Quality Connections: Care Coordination 

Care coordination—a function that helps ensure that the patient’s needs and preferences for health services and information sharing across people, functions, and sites are met over time—is foundational to high-quality healthcare. All patients, but especially the growing number of Americans who suffer from multiple chronic conditions, can benefit from care coordination. Care coordination is an information-rich, patient-centric endeavor that seeks to deliver the right care (and only the right care) to the right patient at the right time. NQF has completed significant work to advance care coordination, including the endorsement of a definition and framework for care coordination; the NQF-convened National Priorities Partnership; the designation of care coordination as one of six “National Priorities” for national action; and the endorsement of preferred practices and performance measures for care coordination. Ultimately, achieving coordinated care will be possible only when healthcare entities collectively agree to place the patient at the center of care.