A Detailed Look At Care Navigation, Navigation software, And How It Relates To Care Coordination And The Future Of Health Care
Unsplash | National Cancer Institute
Within the healthcare system, care coordination has been around for decades. This function plays an important role in keeping all members of a patient’s care team on the same page. More recently, care navigation has started shifting into public light, understandably causing some confusion about how each solution fits within the care system.
In this article, we are going to dive into what care navigation is and how it relates to care coordination. We will explore the scope of the function, the general activities involved, and the benefits it has for the patient and, ultimately, the clinicians and administrators involved in their care.
Of course, grasping the full potential of this function requires contrasting the two in some depth and coming to understand how today’s technology plays a role. Let’s dive in.
A Refresher on Care Coordination
We know how expansive a patient’s care team can be. From clinicians to nursing staff to specialty providers to patient family members, we also know the headache this can cause when communicating every facet of the patient’s care plan to all those involved. Furthermore, patients can’t be expected to reliably communicate every detail themselves.
Through coordination, a cohesive whole can be formed by the sharing of a patient’s care plan across all parties involved.
Care coordination ensures the same information is being shared and proper care is being given across a patient’s entire healthcare team, all while the patient’s needs and personal health goals are being followed. Clearly, having a care coordinator is a vital addition to the care team.
The care coordinator provides the means through which the patient’s care information can be should through documentation, electronic health records, patient advocacy, and strong communication. This can even include coordination software to speed up the process and increase the accuracy of shared information.
The care of a patient goes beyond the walls of the doctor’s office, however. Even with the many avenues involved in a patient’s care plan, there exists exponentially more when dealing with the healthcare system from the outside. For the most efficient success outside these practices, a patient needs a navigator.
Understanding Care Navigation
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Trailblazing every path, side road, and alleyway of the healthcare system can be daunting and, for many people, downright impossible, especially if a patient is dealing with a chronic illness, recovery, or the stress of ever-expanding medical bills. For providers, this can lead to unwarranted calls or visits to clinics, physicians, assistants, or emergency facilities. A navigator can help these patients through the winding roads. Clinical navigation is an approach set up to do just that.
The average patient isn’t trained or equipped to deal with the many avenues involved in keeping up with personal health plans or dealing with insurance companies, and depending on the ailment afflicting the patient, it can be difficult to juggle some of the physical aspects as well. Care navigation, or patient navigation, can help ease these burdens.
But what is patient navigation?
Patient navigation is a function implemented to help highlight the pathways to a patient’s health plan success, including:
- Setting appointments or appointment reminders
- Working with the patient to meet at-home care plans
- Providing reasonable knowledge the patient may need to understand what they’re going through or who they need to get in touch with
- Training the patient in proper terminology as it relates to their condition
- Extending moral and verbal support in matters involving billing and healthcare contacts
- Helping in the attainment of care plan prescriptions
Working closely with the information provided by care coordinators and the patient’s health team, the patient navigator helps guide the patient to the proper care, find the answers to patient questions and concerns, and add to the care coordination function by helping the patient recognize and document any changes to the patient care plan.
Such support can lead to faster recovery in a patient’s physical and mental health while shielding the patient from overly daunting tasks. It frees up phone lines that can become clogged with patients reaching out to the wrong departments or trying to get answers to concerns that aren’t immediately urgent. Lastly, it helps provide additions and updates to care coordination functions that would otherwise be difficult to attain from patients outside of medical facilities.
The benefits are worth it, and as the concept of care navigation grows so does the technology behind it. Mundane tasks of care navigation are already becoming automated, allowing more time for human navigators to spend on complex activities.
Technology’s Role in Modern Healthcare Navigation
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Through artificial intelligence, care navigation is seeing gradual technological advancement. Software solutions are being implemented into care navigation platforms, supplementing care coordination while providing patients, care navigators, and healthcare teams an extended connection and communication beyond medical facilities.
By leveraging powerful AI with empathetic, human-to-human interaction, these evolving approaches provide the most efficient access to care navigation while extending the benefits of care coordination. These benefits include:
- Alerts to the patient and care members when an appointment is missed
- Education for patients on the importance of not missing appointments
- Team-wide updates on the patient’s current ailment status
- Reminders to care members and patients about upcoming labs, diagnostics, shots, etc.
- Personalized education and resources for the patient
- Real-time updates to the healthcare team of a patient’s worsening or advancing conditions, allowing the proper care to be offered and planned earlier on
Streamlining these tasks supplements a care coordination approach already in place, adding order and efficiency outside care facilities. This decreases overhead costs, frees up time for care members to focus on more patients, and ensures each patient gets the proper care.
Conclusion
The importance of care navigation and care coordination within a patient healthcare plan cannot be understated. These functions can increase efficiency, mental stability, overall health and wellness, and overarching knowledge of the healthcare system and available resources. For healthcare workers, administrators, and even investors, this means increases in work efficiency, productivity, patient turnover, and overall earnings.
The efficiency of care navigation measures can be increased even further by automating menial tasks through patient navigation software; this software can help extend care coordination roles already in place while helping keep both the patient and human navigator’s head above water in complex and long-term care.
Care navigation is still young, however, and prone to misunderstanding and misrepresentation. This is an ongoing issue within the healthcare system and one that needs to be addressed. Changing perception will take time, but the benefits are too vast and encompassing to ignore.