Care management programs refer to activities that are meant to improve patient care and reduce the need for more medical services by helping both patients and caregivers manage health conditions. This means that members of the program are obliged to reach out to their network and make sure that all the patients are getting the attention that they need while the caregivers are also provided with proper support all throughout.
Changing The Status Quo
Massive communication gaps and a need to revolutionize the system have made it difficult for managers in these programs to maximize the efficiency and quality of healthcare services that are provided by the caregivers in the long run. This, alongside time-consuming administrative tasks required for documentation, is a common reason why care management programs may sometimes have difficulty scaling effectively.
This means that members of care management programs are often overburdened with work, and have to navigate barriers to work efficiency and technology using their own understanding of the situation.
Implementing An Advocacy Strategy
To help identify and adapt to the ever-changing needs of team members, many innovative health plans are already looking into the implementation of an advocacy strategy. This is sometimes referred to as a concierge model, where the care team includes a staff member that is serving as a single point of contact to cater to all the needs of the members.
Having this staff member, who is known as the advocate, manage communication is effective because members now have someone who they can rely on to address financial and administrative questions as it happens. The advocate can also provide additional clinical support by helping care members implement the triage system and provide guidance on chronic conditions.
This allows the members of your team to get immediate feedback and personalized support based on the issues that they are facing—which improves the satisfaction they feel in their work simultaneously. As such, all of your staff members are more capable of serving the needs of their patients and clients and providing better healthcare services overall.
Digital Health Management May Be The Key
Staff members on the care team worry that the introduction of yet another new digital solution may just end up becoming another bothersome task to struggle with. However, the right digital solutions are capable of alleviating their work for them and allowing them to focus on more intensive tasks.
There are five core competencies of care management. These are data integration, patient stratification and intake, care coordination, patient engagement, and performance management.
Unfortunately, electronic medical records are not enough to meet the needs of healthcare organizations. You will need to go beyond digitizing a patient’s medical history; you must create an interactive workflow that centralizes all the data, manages the patients, and gives an avenue for patients and care managers to communicate with one another.
It is important to strike a balance between implementing a digital health solution that can help your care team, and ensuring that they still have good working relationships with one another. Too much reliance on technology can alienate them from their peers.
As much as possible, this technology should only take over menial and routine tasks so that the brains of the team, the humans, are free to work on more mind-intensive activities.
The Bottom Line
Improving the care management program needs to happen in steps. This cannot be one massive overhaul that can occur overnight. With the right guidance and support from superiors, care management teams can get the help that they need to perform at their best and excel at their line of work.
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