Electronic Health Records For Dummies

Roles and responsibilities

Care management doesn’t deliver itself; it requires people. Your staff has to maneuver many moving parts and many active roles to ensure the group management effort is coordinated, cost-effective, and beneficial to patients.

At the top of your care management food chain is the physician. In this context, doctors help guide and lead the care management efforts, though the majority of work is be done by the team and the patient. The physician helps to confirm that care guidelines and the overall plan are evidenced-based (and continue to be when evidence and recommendations change). If you think of disease management as an extension of the physician practice, you can see how vital it is to have someone championing those efforts and making sure that the quality of your group management is as high as the quality of the individualized care your practice provides.

Next, the group care management team consists of educators, nurses, and case managers. Depending on the setup and culture of your practice, these roles can be played by people who aren’t employed by just one practice, but instead are shared between practices. This comes in handy if, say, you want to monitor a group based on mental health needs, but your practice doesn’t have someone on staff with a wide-reaching knowledge in that area. In this case, you could work in conjunction with a mental health practitioner outside your office to provide optimal care to these patients.

EHR provides a great tool ...