Bridging the Health Gap: Human-Centered Approaches to Connect Clinical and Community Care

Raising healthcare costs, over-burdened healthcare systems, and changing patient expectations drive the need for innovative health delivery services that bridge the gap between traditional clinical care and community level health services. This chapter outlines strategies and examples that can be used to identify health service gaps and create patient accepted, gap-spanning services, by leveraging tools, skills, and methods adapted from non-healthcare environments, including the social service arena, through service re-design that expands on health strategies developed for use in resource poor service areas and though service design strategies predicated on the development of new mid-level provider roles. Among the strategies discussed are the use of a combination of non-healthcare generated data and information with healthcare generated data/information to improve the human centeredness of health services design, the development of learning systems adapted from telehealth to meet telecollaboration needs across non-clinical health service providers, and the design of services that merge non-health sector providers into the healthcare delivery system to create high value, reimbursable services. Services so created have the potential to create reciprocal innovation in traditional healthcare delivery and, more importantly, to expand the delivery of health at the individual, local, regional, national, and global levels.