Coordination of healthfare and long-term care

This paper analyzes the coordination of healthcare and long-term care services in international comparison. In modern welfare states, due to demographic changes, an increasing number of people need high-quality healthcare. To handle these pressures, one potential solution is to enable close cooperation of service providers and the coordination of services between healthcare and long-term care. Achieving good cooperation processes might prevent poor quality of care, reduce discontinuities in the care process, high admission rates, and the overburden of care coordination for patients and their families. Going beyond earlier studies in this field, we seek to understand how coordination concepts are related to the politics and institutional framework of different healthcare and long-term care systems. These systems are based on different modes of financing, regulation, and service provision. Our main research question is how and through which processes different actors and institutional settings support different concepts of coordination in healthcare and long-term care. Furthermore, we ask who according to actors and organizations in this field should be responsible for coordination. We hypothesize that the role of state actors is key to achieve a strong coordination of healthcare and long-term care services and for an explicit assignment of coordination responsibilities.