Abstracts by key term: health care research
The disease management programs (DMP) aim to improve medical care for chronically ill patients across the board. The goal of the treatment program is to coordinate patient treatment throughout the entire course of a chronic illness and across the boundaries of individual service providers and to optimize the patient's health based on medical evidence. On the one hand, it is about minimizing the “variance” of treatment by the practitioner (Glaeske 2011) and enabling treatment principles for treatment by the medical profession based on medical evidence. On the other hand, the patient should also be actively involved in the treatment process. In the doctor-patient interaction, treatment goals should be set in terms of lifestyle changes or the achievement of medical values. The treatment steps and the health condition are recorded in a documentation form by the treating doctor. As part of the legal evaluation of the DMP, service expenditure and survey data on health-related quality of life are also collected for a sample of patients. This data is linked and evaluated – in a pseudonymized form – at the individual level.