If you’re not familiar with care coordination, you could be missing a valuable resource provided by Medicare. Care coordination takes some of the stress out of managing your health, and it prevents gaps in communication that can interfere with your care.
What Does Care Coordination Mean?
What is coordinated health care? Coordinated health care for seniors gives you one central person who can manage your health care from a bird’s eye view, so to speak. The health care coordinator can manage multiple diagnoses, multiple medications and multiple specialists, to ensure there are no gaps in communication or treatment.
Care coordinators often help patients with high-risk health concerns and those making the transition for care delivery – for instance from hospital to home. But care coordinators can help anyone on original Medicare to ensure their health concerns are treated efficiently and that they are taking a proactive approach to screenings and other care.
What Do Care Coordinators Do?
The benefits of care coordination center around ensuring clear communication. It’s important that the patient and all providers have the same understanding of the patient’s needs and treatments.
When a patient has a high-risk health situation, it’s easy to see how things can get confusing. Different specialists may be prescribing medicine or ordering screenings. For the patient, it’s often overwhelming. Having one person handle the oversight can make a huge difference.
Even people without high-risk health care needs can benefit from a central coordinator, ensuring all their health care needs are met. Your care coordinator can ensure you’ve had all necessary screenings and that you’re proactively involved in maintaining your health.
Where Can I Find a Care Coordinator?
Medicare offers care coordination services through Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). If you have original Medicare, ask your primary care doctor if they participate in an ACO.
If you don’t have a primary care physician, you should. Having a primary care doctor, who works from a value-based care clinic, can make all the difference in maintaining your health and ensuring you get care that can help prevent larger health issues.
Find a Primary Care Physician
At NewPrimaryCare.com™, we offer a Find a Physician tool to help you find a local primary care doctor. We have developed a curated list of primary care providers who offer value-based care.
What is value-based care? With this model, your physician makes you the focus of your health care. With value-based care, your physician will see fewer patients, so they will have more time to spend with you. They get to know you and your unique needs. These are specialists in caring for Medicare patients, and they are experts in elderly care management.
Coordinated health care is better care. If you’re on original Medicare and would like coordinated health care, talk to your primary care physician. Or if you need a doctor, find a primary care physician in your area that practices under the value-based care model.
