1Mobile Integrated Healthcare Practice: A Healthcare Delivery Strategy to Improve Access, Outcomes, and Value

The U.S. health care system is often described as one that fails to achieve optimal health outcomes while generating exorbitant costs for patients, payors and society. [1] The Institute of Medicine (IOM) estimates that $750 billion—30 % of the U.S. annual health care budget—is wasted on unnecessary services, inefficient delivery, excessive administrative costs and prevention failures. [2] Barriers to patient access, fragmentation of acute and chronic care, ineffective management of chronic illness, and complex, outdated reimbursement processes leave patients, clinicians and payors frustrated at historic levels. In Crossing the Quality Chasm, released in 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) Committee on the Quality of Health Care in America described an urgent need to redesign the healthcare delivery system. The IOM emphasized the need to expand information technology and to create payment policies based on innovation, outcomes and performance improvement, rather than on the delivery of care itself. [3] Renewed focus on bringing healthcare to th