Financial Incentives to Stimulate Integration of Care

Introduction Chronic conditions are related to 60% of disability adjusted life years and account for 75% of total health care expenditure worldwide. The economic burden of chronic conditions is much larger when considering the costs of productivity loss and informal care. The threat that chronic conditions pose to population health and economies increase because of increasing prevalence and multi-morbidity, which multiplies the burden of chronic conditions. Integrated care is seen as the means to tackle this threat by improving population health and patient experience with care, and reducing costs. It includes initiatives that seek to improve outcomes for those with (complex) chronic health problems and needs by overcoming issues of fragmentation through linkage or coordination of services of different providers along the continuum of care. In the era of personalized medicine and genomics, integrated care may be characterized by the recently suggested term ‘humanomics’ because it incorporates treatment based on personal need, preferences and capacity, it interacts with the context in which it is implemented, and its success depends highly on human behaviour [1]. Financial incentives are one of the main prerequisites for integrating care [2].