How services like Chronic Care Management are making patients more loyal
The ACA introduced Chronic Care Management in January 2015 to help doctors better manage their patients suffering from multiple chronic disease states
. The program has been somewhat slow to be taken up on due to the logistics of servicing high volumes of Medicare patients with a 20 minute monthly phone call.
This has caused a new business to boom: Chronic Care Management service providers. Ancillary Medical Solutions has partnered with Caresync to provide the gold standard in Chronic Disease Management (CCM).
Patients are enjoying the monthly calls they receive from their Care Manager. The Care Manager will be a minimum of a Medical Assistant that is employed by the CCM provider. This person phones the patient each month to discuss various aspects of their health and well being from medication compliance to history of recent falls. Self help goals are discussed to help the patient achieve simple life style goals that support their health and well being.
The outcome of these calls is that patients are better educated and motivated around their self care. Incidents that require their physicians attention are directed back to the office promptly so that conditions can be managed before they become bigger problems.
Patients feel more empowered and enjoy the monthly contact. They also have access to medical questions outside of normal physician office hours. The patient has access to their medical records which is beneficial for carers as well as when they see other providers, ticking one of the boxes for meaningful use credits.
For physicians, the Caresync portal allows transparency of patient notes between providers, reducing the time spent calling other offices or sifting through notes to find information on the latest visits. Some doctors cite that they spend 20% of their time on these activities.
Chronic Care Management will help keep patients at home and healthier due to the accountability that the monthly contact provides to patients. Doctors can see patient medication compliance as can the patients. It is always easier to manage things that can be measured and with the colorful graphs that the CCM platform provides both patients and physicians, it becomes easy to see how medication use is being tracked
With the patient-centric focus of Chronic Care Management and Meaningful Use credits, it is easy to see why physicians are enjoying the ease of integration of the CCM platforms. For a physician to provide CCM, one staff member would be required for every 250 Medicare patients that qualify. For offices with 1000 patients this could mean a requirement of 3 or more staff to manage the program.
Added to this, the physician and patient portals enable Meaningful Use Credits as well as peace of mind for the physician that all aspects of CCM will be handled professionally and completely.
At Ancillary Medical Solutions, we aim to provide the best in class solutions for physicians to enhance their patient offer as well as increase revenues. If you are interested in Chronic Care Management or other Ancillary Services, click on one of the links below.