Stephen Nuckolls Emphasizes Importance of Care Coordinators in an ACO

While speaking at the National Association of Accountable Care Organizations Spring 2016 Conference, Stephen Nuckolls, CEO of Coastal Carolina Quality Care, said that care coordinators have played an important role in his accountable care organization (ACO) to reach out to the patient and motivate them to become more engaged in their care.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Coastal Carolina Quality Care has a lot of care coordinators embedded into the ACO. What is the importance of that?

We feel like care coordination is one of the central parts of our organization. They help us with patient engagement and how do we get them involved and one of the main ways to get patients involved in their care is to let them know what they need to do. And many times, for especially our frail and elderly patients, they need more contact than our physicians alone can do.

So we set up different regimens and protocols and our care coordinators call them and follow up to see how well they’re doing, to see if they’re having problems, either getting their medications or taking their meds or questions about them. We also are a little more directive in saying, have you done this and are you doing your exercise regimen. And many times, it’s just following up to see how they do and showing them how much we care that really makes a difference.