It’s all About Relationships: How Care Managers Can Increase Patient Activation, Lower Healthcare Costs
Communication, trust and mutual respect are important in any relationship, and that’s certainly true in healthcare. Patients with complex needs or chronic illness who feel heard, valued and respected by their care managers are more likely to take an active role in their own care, leading to improved outcomes and lower costs, research shows.
The authenticity of the care manager-client relationship—how genuine and consistent the patient perceives the provider to be—also makes a difference, some studies have found. And though learning how to build relationships takes time and training, the investment pays off in several ways.
For instance, a 2013 study published in Health Affairs looked at 33,000 clients in a large healthcare system and found that costs were 8-21 percent higher for clients with very low activation levels compared to costs for clients with the highest activation levels. What leads to higher activation? Relationships.
Annual event focuses on case management education, advocacy 
Coordinating care for vulnerable patients is rewarding and meaningful work, but it can also be incredibly stressful. Increased caseloads, expanding responsibilities, and greater complexity of patient needs are some of the major stressors affecting care managers, according to a 2016 article in 
Addressing social determinants of health is viewed as a key way to improve population health programs by 80 percent of payers, the website 
Inspiring messages, interesting data and important themes were highlighted last month at the Commission for Case Manager’s 
Two new studies on care management show encouraging results regarding the effectiveness of case managers in improving patient outcomes and/or reducing costs.