Critical elements of health care coordination for people with physical disabilities

The University of Minnesota study, Health Care Coordination for Persons with Disabilities: Critical Elements and Consumer Outcomes, is a five year study of health care coordination for adults with physical disabilities in Minnesota's Special Needs Basic Care program (SNBC). The research objective is to identify and test the elements of care coordination to improve care delivery to persons with disabilities.

Three activities were initiated to develop an operational definition of health care coordination: a review of the literature, an environmental scan, and a series of participatory planning and decision making (PPDM) groups in which groups of care coordinators, their managers and people with physical disabilities were involved in developing consensus around the critical elements of care coordination. Using a Delphi method of coding and NVivo as our coding and model building tool, we developed domains and elements of care coordination. Participants were asked to rank elements within specific domains related to the delivery of care coordination.

This process was repeated with six groups of care coordinators, one group of managers, and four groups of people with disabilities using a focus group approach called Participatory Planning and Decision Making (PPDM) groups.

This paper will present the findings of the environmental scan, the PPDM process and the development of a health care coordination model. Specifically, the principal finding that the critical elements of care coordination can be categorized into organization and process domains in accordance with Donabedian's model of quality assurance in health care model.