The Health House is a facility where procedures allow chronic patients to be taken care of and followed continuously, in order to reduce the damage caused by chronicity and to delay the evolution of the chronic disease so as to improve the living conditions of the person and reduce or contain the costs of the health service.
This can be achieved on the condition that the citizen’s care and consequent diagnostic and therapeutic care path is constantly monitored so that the person’s lifestyle is consistent with his or her pathology and health controls are consistent with regional guidelines.
It is quite evident that in order to achieve these objectives, a complete synergy between all the services and professionals who come into play in the management of the patient and his PDTA (Diagnostic Therapeutic Care Pathway) is necessary. Therefore, there must not be interventions on therapies unless agreed between the professionals included in the course. Meetings will be necessary to discuss cases, it should not happen that citizens included in a route can come into contact with the ASL services independently and without the knowledge of the route managers, except for emergency events, which must in any case be brought to the attention of the route managers.
All this implies that the citizen is provided with a personalized and computerized card that he must always have with him and that allows any service or professional to know the patient’s medical history and who to contact; it also means that there is a computerized alarm system that informs the route manager of any intervention of the services outside the route. For example, if outside the scheduled times the citizen were to go to a CUP counter to book services, the alarm signal should appear on the screen of the counter operator in order to share with the route managers the need or not for the requested service. If its usefulness is not verified and the citizen insists on the request, he should pay the benefit in full and not just the ticket.
These considerations are the support for the correct application of the Health House, whose implementation requires a profound change in the attitude of professionals who must understand the obligation to share decisions through multidisciplinary comparison and the need for the ASL to invest above all by activating IT tools and training, because such a radical change in the attitude of services and professionals cannot take place without adequate training in new procedures and new care content.
The Casa della Salute, if the above is achieved, can also be the seat of territorial services that, when included in a single structure, certainly determines a management economy that can allow the Company to activate the full range of services useful to ensure effective protection of the health of citizens.
