Key Challenges Facing the Effective Integration of Chronic Care Management Programs

A patient's permission to receive chronic care management services should be obtained and recorded in the patient's medical chart before providing such services.

Chronic care management services have many benefits, such as saving providers money, improving patients' health, and bringing in extra cash for healthcare providers. Designing and implementing a chronic care management (CCM) program is complex, which makes it less likely that people will use it. Patients need to be involved in achieving the desired results, and those who engaged in their medical care have astonishingly positive outcomes. Integration of a CCM program can be complex in several ways. Below are the difficulties in implementing the management of long-term care.

Involving patients to consent: Getting patients' permission to do something is essential. It is necessary for medical practices to obtain the patient's permission before providing chronic care management services and to ensure that the consent gets documented within the patient's medical records. To get the desired results, they also need to involve patients. Patients who are actively engaged in their medical care show impressive results. When the patient knows and understands how complicated cost sharing and individual needs can be, it will be easier for providers to get "qualified consent." All of this takes time, which means that few or no people sign up for CCM.

Patient identification: Most of the time, finding eligible patients is the biggest problem. 

Without a service that helps with automation, checking the data of thousands of patients by hand is not easy. Providers need to be ready for things that might not go as planned and put together a team of trusted and experienced people who can fill in for a nurse and identify the patient quickly. Someone who knows a lot about CCM needs to be in charge of the whole process to ensure that everything is clear and that CCM works well all year long.

Managing multiple teams: Every organization wants to give patients high-quality medical care that doesn't stop, but managing a group can be tricky because people are unpredictable and can call in sick, switch jobs, have personal problems, and more. They are good reasons, and it's hard to say no. Providers can't tell patients they have an appointment but can't make it because they don't have enough staff.

Tracking activities and managing audits: To get the best results, keeping track of what the internal team is doing is essential. If they do it by hand, it will be a lot more work. With a secure cloud-based platform, the odds are in their favor, and they won't have to worry about keeping track of what their in-house team is doing. As a medical practice, once they're done with services and bills, it's time to ensure they have the proper trials and paperwork in case Medicare does an audit. It can be challenging if they only use internal systems to manage chronic care.