You have a loved one that lives in a different city or maybe even an hour away. A lot of times, the care that you have to provide and the oversight that you have to provide for your loved one can be really time-consuming and can also cause a lot of effort on your part. You might be trying to coordinate doctor appointments, making sure that the groceries are purchased, making sure that their house is clean, or even if there’s an emergency, you might be the first person that gets called to meet your family member at the hospital. These situations can be really stressful and overwhelming to you, and it’s a perfect situation for our case management services.
Hi, I’m Chris Mihm, and today we’re going to talk about case management and the benefits that they can provide to you.
When it comes to working with a home care agency, there’s care coordination and case management, and they’re really two different services. Here at Freedom Home Care, we actually provide both the care coordination and the case management service. Our care coordination program actually involves an RN or a licensed social worker that would be assigned to your loved one. The care coordination involves setting up an initial plan of care through an assessment process and then ongoing monitoring on a consistent basis, which could be on a weekly basis or a monthly basis.
With the care coordination, our nurse and sometimes our office staff will actually go out to the house. They’re going to check in on the care that’s being provided and making sure that it’s adequate on an ongoing basis. If there are situations where something needs to be updated, our care coordinators will actually update the plan of care, communicate those changes to your caregivers, and make sure that those updated plans of care are in place, and making sure that your loved one is well cared for.
So the benefits of care coordination are that your loved one is going to be seeing their nurse or the care coordinator on a consistent basis. With our care coordination program, it’s very nice that there’s multiple people that have eyes on your loved ones. So, the care coordinator or the nurse is going to be contacting your loved one on a consistent basis and ensuring that if there are changes in the plan of care that need to be made, that those are going to be updated and communicated to our staff.
At Freedom Home Care, we offer another service that is called our case management service. Case management is really a step above care coordination. And with the case management, your loved one is actually getting an RN or a licensed social worker that is assigned to their case. Case management is actually really impactful for the family that has a loved one that lives far away. So our case manager, such as an RN or licensed social worker, is actually going to be an advocate for your loved one. They’re going to communicate with them, whether it’s a daily basis or a weekly basis to make sure that their needs are being met at home.
One of the things that is really different from a care coordination standpoint, where we might have a caregiver that will take your loved one to a doctor appointment, drop them off, and your loved one will actually go into the doctor appointment on their own. With case management, that RN or social worker is actually going to go into the doctor appointment, advocate for your loved one, provide any of the updates that need to be made, and then they can take notes and communicate that information back to you after the doctor appointment. In a lot of cases, there’s going to need to be follow-up appointments, and our case manager is the one who will advocate, set up those appointments for your loved one. They can even report back to you after the appointments with a written report or a phone call. In some cases, your loved one might need something as simple as a grocery order placed or something ordered for them on Amazon. Those are small things that our case managers, through their daily interaction with your loved one, can make an impact in their life. Another thing with our case managers, they can provide care for somebody who’s at home. Or wherever they call home. In a lot of instances, that might be an assisted living facility or an independent living facility.
Our case management service is really a white glove service. In some instances, your loved one might only take advantage of our case management service at this time. But the benefit is that you’ve got a home care agency that has both a home care service and a case management service. If your loved one is not ready for full home care services, they can actually start with a case manager, and if their needs change, we can add home care to their services, and it’s a great complement to our case management service.
