Integrated Care Pathways: New service coming soon

Released 08/09/2022

Integrated Care Pathways (ICP) is our provider-led service delivery model designed in partnership with the sector. It puts the injured person at the centre of their recovery and brings together an interdisciplinary team of health providers to support people with their recovery journey and to achieve their rehabilitation goals. 

As part of the interdisciplinary team, it gives health professionals the flexibility to design an integrated, coordinated and effective treatment plan, focused on enabling the client to achieve their rehabilitation goals rather than providing siloed services. 

Our Integrated Care Pathway for musculoskeletal injuries (ICP MSK) service is coming next year. ICP MSK will be the result of our four-year Escalated Care Pathways (ECP) pilot that’s coming to an end in December 2023. ECP is our largest test of value-based commissioning for clients that experience musculoskeletal injuries and have moderate to high injury and non-injury complexity. 

We’ve gained a lot of learnings from the pilot and have seen many benefits for both injured people and providers. We’re taking those learnings to develop ICP MSK - a standardised service model that will be rolled out nationally.  

ICP MSK will include health professionals who provide the following services: 

  • physical rehabilitation
  • vocational rehabilitation 
  • surgical services
  • navigation services
  • pain management services
  • psychology services
  • specialist services. 

Our intention is to enable providers who meet our requirements to be part of ICP MSK services for eligible clients.   

Suppliers don't need to setup or be part of a national service. We want to enable local health professionals to partner with their colleagues to meet the needs of their local communities. ​ 

This sounds like me, tell me more 

We’re working through the finer details of what the new service model looks like and how it will work in practice. The current suppliers and providers have been sharing with us data and feedback to help inform the new service model.  

The new model is subject to ACC Board approval in early 2023, but we want to start engaging with you now so you can start to understand if this is for you and to gauge your readiness to provide this service to our clients.  

We know not everyone will be ready to deliver ICP MSK services from December 2023. To allow for this, you will be able to apply for this service contract at any time after December 2023.   

We will share further information as and when it becomes available.  We’ll also work closely with you to ensure you’re ready and able to provide this service when your contract starts. 

Keeping you informed 

We’re developing a dedicated webpage which will be launched soon. This will be your main source of information for the service and how to apply. We’ll keep it up to date and let you know about the changes via our Provider Update newsletter. Keep a look out for more information.  

More information 

Hear what our clients are saying by reading Carla's story

About Integrated Care Pathways 

Integrated Care Pathways (ICP) is our provider-led service delivery model we designed in partnership with the sector.  It puts the client at the centre of their recovery and brings together an interdisciplinary team of health providers to support the client with their recovery journey and achieve their rehabilitation goals.  

As part of the interdisciplinary team, it gives heath providers the flexibility to design an integrated, coordinated and effective treatment plan, focused on enabling the client to achieve their rehabilitation goals rather than providing siloed services.  

This is an innovative way of managing people with injuries that require multiple rehabilitation services. Patients follow an integrated, customised and coordinated plan to move them smoothly from injury to recovery.   

ICP has been designed for patients needing more integrated, specialised and coordinated treatment.  

The aim is to improve outcomes for clients with similar injury types and increase the quality and efficiency of their recovery.   

ICP’s beginnings – how did we get to here? 

We wanted to transform how we work with the health sector to improve client outcomes. So, we engaged extensively with the health sector on elective services and identified problems and opportunities.  

We found there was a need to address fragmented systems. Our existing services would support specific parts of a client's rehabilitation needs, leading to services being delivered in silos, and clients potentially receiving variable treatment. 

There was an opportunity for us to be more integrated and innovative with the sector, increase equity to services, and improve outcomes for clients. 

Working in partnership with the sector, we developed care pathways that aim to provide access to multiple rehabilitation services, in a coordinated way.   

This has led to our largest test of value-based commissioning for clients who experience musculoskeletal injuries – the Escalated Care Pathways (ECP) pilot.  

Benefits we’ve seen 

The ECP pilot has demonstrated considerable benefits to clients and providers 

An important part of ECP is capturing patient reported outcome measures (PROM) and patient reported experience measures (PREM).  

Collecting health outcome measures help us better understand a client’s recovery journey and what’s important to them. Helping us understand the value of the services we provide, equity across client groups (particularly Māori), and guide service design and improvement. 

So far, the data demonstrates significant improvement in outcome and high levels of satisfaction:  

  • 89% of Māori and non-Māori who have exited the pathway and completed their outcomes surveys are reporting improved health outcomes.
  • 95% of Māori and non-Māori are telling us they’re having a positive patient reported experience
  • For clients who have been supported by the programme, we’re seeing a downward trend of reinjury and are likely to prevent the need for surgery.  

In April 2022, we surveyed our current ECP providers about the ECP pilot: 

  • 88% of respondents (n=153; 18% survey response rate) were satisfied with ECP and 90% felt that the effectiveness of dealing with ACC patients under ECP has improved compared to business as usual. 
  • A large majority of the respondents agreed that interdisciplinary team approach is more effective in creating the best recovery plans for patients. They also agreed that the ECP way of working enables a shared view of a patient’s recovery journey and outcomes and leads to better outcomes for patients.
  • The respondents see many benefits to ECP and would like to see this initiative rolled out more widely with ‘fine tuning’ of certain aspects. 

 

 

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