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Background: Current health systems are increasingly challenged to meet the needs of a growing number of patients living with chronic and often multiple health conditions. The primary outcome of care, it is argued, is not merely curing disease but also optimizing functioning over a person’s life span. According to the World Health Organization, functioning can serve as foundation for a comprehensive picture of health and augment the biomedical perspective with a broader and more comprehensive picture of health as it plays out in people’s lives. The crucial importance of information about patient’s functioning for a well-performing health system, however, has yet to be sufficiently appreciated.
Methods: This paper argues that functioning information is fundamental in all components of health systems and enhances the capacity of health systems to optimize patients’ health and health-related needs.
Results and conclusion: Beyond making sense of biomedical disease patterns, health systems can profit from using functioning information to improve interprofessional collaboration and achieve cross-cutting disease treatment outcomes.
- Implications for rehabilitation
- Functioning is a key health outcome for rehabilitation within health systems.
- Information on restoring, maintaining, and optimizing human functioning can strengthen health system response to patients’ health and rehabilitative needs.
- Functioning information guides health systems to achieve cross-cutting health outcomes that respond to the needs of the growing number of individuals living with chronic and multiple health conditions.
- Accounting for individuals functioning helps to overcome fragmentation of care and to improve interprofessional collaboration across settings