Continuity of Care : The development of a method for continuous measurement of continuity of care

Good continuity of care is considered desirable and is often referred to as an essential component in creating a more patient-centered health care. However, what is meant by continuity of care is not entirely self-evident and there are different ways to quantify and address it. The purpose of this study is to introduce a method for continuous measurement of continuity, where visits between patients and physicians in various care clinics are of interest. Five established measurements (indices) of continuity of care were evaluated; MFPC, K, COC, MCI and SECON. Calculations on these indices were made using hospital visits-related data from January 2011 to April 2015, where a time window of 1.5 years was used when calculating index values. The results from the calculations show a high correlation between all indices when calculated on an average of all patients at a clinic. Based on this, properties such as intuitive interpretation and simple calculations made MFPC-index this study’s single choice of index. It can be used to examine the change of a clinic’s patient’s continuity over time. The index also allows to assign a value to a physician, showing how much continuity that doctor contributes to all its patients. A tool was also developed to visualises how many visits each patient has had with how many different doctors at a clinic. This tool allows the identification of individual patients whose continuity can be seen as undesired. These three components of the method for continuous measurement of continuity can be seen as representations of continuity from a system’s, physician’s and patient’s perspective