In care management, creating personalized care plans for patients is anything but straightforward. Care managers juggle unique patient needs, adapt to evolving health challenges, and balance administrative tasks—all while striving to ensure compliance and achieve high-quality outcomes. The process is both a science and an art, requiring precision, compassion, and the right tools.
What is a Care Plan?
At its core, a Care Plan—or person-centered plan—is a collaborative agreement. It bridges the member, their family, healthcare professionals, and social services to manage health and wellness on a day-to-day basis. This dynamic blueprint outlines goals, interventions, and steps tailored to the member’s specific needs, helping them navigate their health journey with clarity and support.
Why Care Planning Matters in Care Management
Care planning is essential because it provides a structured approach to managing a member’s health. A well-crafted care plan fosters alignment among care team members, prevents oversights, and ensures that interventions are timely and effective. It also empowers patients by placing their preferences and needs at the forefront, leading to better engagement and outcomes. In the absence of a thoughtful care plan, patients may face gaps in care, fragmented services, or missed opportunities for early intervention.
Challenges with Traditional Care Plans
Traditional care planning can often feel like solving a puzzle with missing pieces. Care managers are tasked with gathering information from multiple systems, interpreting incomplete patient histories, and drafting plans—all manually. This labor-intensive process isn’t just exhausting; it’s also prone to inefficiencies and errors.
Patient needs evolve quickly, and without tools to keep up, care managers may find themselves lagging behind. Missed deadlines, care gaps, and outdated interventions can significantly impact a patient’s health journey. Even with the best intentions, traditional methods may lack the agility and precision required to address the complexities of modern care management.
How Sevida Enhances the Care Plan Building Process
Sevida’s care plans bring all essential information into one place, offering care managers a holistic view of the member’s profile. Key features include:
- Comprehensive Data: Member details like diagnoses, medications, allergies, life domains (e.g., education, living arrangements, employment), and crisis plans are easily accessible.
- Change Logs: Any updates to the care plan are recorded, providing a transparent history of modifications.
- Actionable Insights: Care gaps identified through NCQA certified quality measures are flagged, enabling proactive care. Unaddressed needs are listed separately, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
Building a Care Plan: A Nested Approach
Sevida’s care plan structure organizes information hierarchically for clarity and focus:
- Needs: The foundation of the care plan.
- Goals: Specific outcomes associated with each need.
- Interventions: Concrete actions to achieve each goal.
After a care manager submits the member’s comprehensive assessment in Sevida, identified member needs are automatically generated based on how questions are answered. When building the care plan, these identified needs conveniently appear in a list so they can easily be added to the plan, and tackled individually and appropriately.
Care managers can add important details and set dates for each need, goal, or intervention. Once complete, the care plan is easily converted into a shareable PDF for care team distribution.
Integrating Care Planning into Configurable Workflows
Care plans are an integral part of workflows that can be customized by organizations to align with their specific needs. These workflows ensure that care plans are created within designated timeframes, promoting timely and effective care for members. By tailoring the process, organizations can prioritize proper care delivery while maintaining flexibility to address unique requirements. For example:
- New Member Workflow: Care managers are guided step-by-step, from contacting the member and obtaining consent to conducting care needs assessments and completing the care plan. Configurable reminders ensure no step is missed.
- Returning Members Workflow: Members with an active consent and/or assessment are seamlessly routed to the right spot in the care plan process, ensuring continuity and efficiency – and save care managers time. .
Conclusion
Care planning doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With Sevida, care managers can transition from traditional, error-prone methods to a streamlined, data-driven process. The result? More effective interventions, stronger patient outcomes, and a smoother journey for everyone involved. Sevida empowers care teams to do what they do best: provide personalized, high-quality care that makes a difference.
Stay tuned for a future blog where we will share how Sevida’s AI-powered capabilities revolutionize care planning.
