identify change management aspects that directly affect elements of the patient experience essential to providing high-quality, patient-centered care.

Change is a part of care coordination. Understanding the aspects of change management that directly affect elements of the patient experience essential to providing high-quality, patient-centered care can help you succeed in your care coordination plan. A vital aspect of change management is communication. As noted earlier, we must ensure that we communicate effectively. This involves being clear in our communication regardless of whether we are communicating with the patient, their family members, or health care professionals involved in the care coordination plan. As such, we are supposed to tell them of the planned changes and let them improve on that changes. Therefore, try to be as effective in your communication as possible. Another essential aspect of change is feedback. Always be open to giving and receiving feedback, and do not wait for the members of the coordination plan to give it to you, whether it is about their experiences or what they feel needs to be done; we always need to solicit feedback and give it. This will help you identify achieved successes and what needs to be done to further align the change to the expected care outcomes and goals. And most importantly, train the care team members on what they need to do and when and where they need to do it to facilitate successful change. All of these aspects of change management, effective communication, giving and receiving feedback, and training of care team members significantly impact the patient experience and can help deliver quality patient-centered care.

Before implementing the care coordination plan, let me first explain why it is important to base and design the care coordination plan on ethically made decisions. The first rationale for basing coordinated care plans on ethical decision-making is how ethics in nursing make us accountable for the care and the outcomes of the provided care (Haddad & Geiger, 2022). An ethical approach to patient care will always ensure that the needs and preferences of the patients and their families define how the coordinated care plan is designed. This means that it is possible to provide more patient- and family-centered coordinated care. According to Ko et al. (writing in 2019), this improves the efficiency of the care operations and the outcomes of the care plan.

Now, let’s discuss the potential impact of specific healthcare policy provisions.

As you know, healthcare policy provisions can potentially impact the outcomes of coordinated care and patient experiences. As such, specific healthcare policy provisions potentially impact outcomes and patient experiences. One such specific policy provision is HIPAA’s privacy rule. The provisions of the privacy rule focus on the privacy and confidentiality of personally identifiable healthcare information and the need for patient’s consent in sharing such information. This means that nurses must ensure the highest level of confidentiality when handling and sharing patient information. The provisions guarantee the privacy of patient information. Therefore, the patients get to trust the care professionals with the information they give. This can improve patient care planning or make necessary changes to the coordinated care plan based on the new patient-provided information. In fact, evidence from a study by Miller et al. (writing in 2019) focusing on advance care planning (ACP) notes that assured privacy show that it improves the therapeutic relationship between patients and nurses and helps the openness of the patients in making wishes known. The study further notes that this helped with communication challenges and improved the experiences of the patient and the family members.

Nurses have a vital role in the coordination and continuum of care.

So far, you have noted that the nurse is the master planner of the care delivered to patients based on the considerations of the needs and preferences of the patient and their families. At all levels of the delivery of coordinated care, the nurse sets care goals for the patient, educates the patient and their family members, identifies the needed resources for the care plan, organizes the resources, and helps identify and manage needed care changes. The nurses must ensure that the patient and their families receive the best care and treatment regardless of whether they are within the facility settings or receiving care from home. Therefore, as a nurse, you are a vital element in the coordination of care and throughout the entire continuum of care.