How the Triple Aim Can Be Successful

How the Triple Aim Can Be Successful

Donesha Barton

Arkansas State University

Abstract

        The Triple Aim is a framework that focuses on three main goals: improving patients’ experience during care, improving the health of populations, and reducing the per-capita cost of health care. The Triple Aim faces many barriers causing its lack of success. These barriers include demand: new technologies including many with limited impact with outcomes, physician-centric care: little or no foreign competition to spur domestic change, and too little appreciation of system knowledge among clinicians and organizations. There are five components that, if implemented, can result in the success of the Triple Aim. These include: focus on the individuals and families, redesign of primary care services, population health management, cost control platform, and system integration. With health organizations’ focus on the five components, the Triple Aim can be a result of better care, better population health, and lower costs.

How the Triple Aim Can Be Successful

        In 2007, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) created a concept to potentially lead us to better models for providing healthcare called the Triple Aim. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement is an organization that is focused on improving health and health care worldwide and also promotes learning initiatives and framework through the Triple Aim.  The Triple Aim consist of three main goals that include: improving the patient experience of  health care services they receive, improving health on a population scale, and lowering the per-capita cost of health care. The goal of this concept is to improve the delivery of health care in the United States.  There are many barriers that are the cause of the Triple Aim being unsuccessful. Achieving the Triple Aim is difficult because one organization is rarely accountable for all three of the dimensions covered in the Triple Aim (Jonas & Kovner 2015). The components of the Triple Aim are not independent of each other. Changes pursuing any one goal can affect the other two, sometimes negatively and sometimes positively (Berwick 2016). The IHI states five components for the success of Triple Aim which are: focusing on the individuals and families, redesigning primary care services, population health management, cost control platform, and system integration.