Jessa Dunivan Describes How Care Coordinators Work Behind the Scenes to Facilitate Patient Care

The core of the work that care coordinators do is done behind the scenes so that all of the core information is in the chart when the doctor is meeting with the patient, said Jessa Dunivan, patient services manager, Northwest Medical Specialties.

Transcript

Is there anything that care coordinators do that is misunderstood or maybe doesn’t get noticed since they work behind the scenes?

I do think that the care coordination can be a little bit misunderstood at times from our department to the other departments because we’re essentially like chart police. We’re going in and we’re reviewing all the orders. We’re looking at all the medications. We’re making sure that all the referrals are sent out and that the loops are closed and we’re contacting the pharmacies to make sure that when Dr. [Sibel] Blau writes a prescription for patients to start a new oral therapy we’re contacting the pharmacy to make sure that that drug was filled or we’re making sure that the patient picked up the drug. If they didn’t pick up the drug, we’re gonna know about it, and we would ask the pharmacy why they didn’t pick up the drug. Well, maybe they didn’t pick it up because there was a very large co-pay and, in that case, the care coordinators would reach out to the financial counselors in order to help engage any kind of financial assistance that might be available because the goal is to keep it moving forward.

I think that it could be misunderstood that we’re not necessarily patient-facing but the core of our work is done behind the scenes so that the people who are patient-facing have a smooth ride if they can throughout that process, making sure that all of the core information is in the chart so that the doctor can do their job—performance status, staging, medications, closing the loop on referrals. If all of those pieces are in place, then the doctor has the information they need in order to appropriately treat the patient when the patient’s right in front of them.