Healthcare Liaison Blog » patient advocate

Who Needs a Healthcare Advocate?

Joanna Smith — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:53:27 +0000

Such a new field, with many people offering various services. But who needs an advocate?
anyone worried about talking with their doctor;
anyone going into the hospital;
someone with a newly identified condition; people wondering what questions to ask of their doctor; anyone confused about their insurance; someone with questions about healthcare reform; if you’ve received a bill you don’t understand for a healthcare provider. All these people need advocates to explain, problem solve and follow you through the healthcare maze–no matter what part of it you’re in!

National Association of Healthcare Advocacy Consultants

Joanna Smith — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 04:19:17 +0000

A frequent occurrence: the phone rings, and a desperate voice on the other end of the line says “I need to find an advocate and I came across your website, but you’re not in my area. Do you know anyone in my state who does what you do?” Up until now, there was no central Association that consumers could go to if they wanted to find an advocate. There will be, effective August 1, 2009.
Because we heard this question so frequently from people in all parts of the country, Healthcare Liaison, Inc. decided to start the National Association of Healthcare Advocacy Consultants. The membership is open to everyone with an interest in the field: consumers, nurses, social workers, physicians, physical therapists, academicians, researchers, and policy-makers.

Membership opens on August 1st

The web site (www.nahac.com) will have a geographic listing of all the members, a searchable database of Healthcare Advocates all over the country and brief biographies of each member so people searching for an advocate can choose one that has the skills they need. And also, Healthcare Advocates will be able to locate each other for peer support and referrals. Come join the Association! The membership page will be open on August 1, 2009, and the first Annual conference will be in Berkeley, CA November 14th and 15th, 2009. Look for details on the conference on www.nahac.com on September 1, 2009. It’s an exciting step in this evolving profession!

A Medical Home: So New It’s Old

Joanna Smith — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:20:24 +0000

One of my new clients wistfully said the other day, “I wish there was someone at UCSF (University of California, San Francisco Medical Center) who was in charge of me: someone who knows me and refers me to specialists when I need it and then talks to those specialists about what they found out.”

This client was expressing a feeling often voiced by my clients: there is “no one there” to look after them, no one who is looking at the big picture. In fact, this is a common complaint of clients being treated at major medical centers: who is in charge of all my care? What he realized in the subsequent discussion was that Healthcare Liaison creates that system for him, and that he had found his “Medical Home”. A good healthcare advocate does exactly that: in a complex medical world, we create the “Medical Home”.

The concept of “Medical Home” is not a new concept. In the era of medicine that pre-dated the rise of specialty practices, there was a medical home with the family doctor. If someone needed to see a specialist, the family doctor referred them and was in close communication with that specialist and continued to provide the overall care. If you asked someone “who’s your doctor?”, they could easily answer that question.

With the rise in specialty practices, the picture became less clear. You could go see a specialist for a particular problem, but maybe that specialist was outside of the regular group practice that you used. Would the information from the specialist get back to your primary care (“regular”) doctor?

With Medical Home, we go back to the original design: there would be a primary care physician (and office) that would effectively manage a person’s care, contacting specialists, getting updates and keeping the big picture in place.While the concept is very appealing, there are some major structural changes that would need to happen in physician’s practices to make this an effective practice:
1. The standard primary care physician will not have the time him or herself–and it will not be cost effective–to do all of the follow-up that needs to happen; the office will need to hire nurses or medical social workers to accomplish this–and that will be costly.
2. Finding qualified personnel to do this kind of care will be difficult: there is currently a shortage of both nurses and medical social workers;
3. The question of whether insurance will reimburse for these services has yet to be decided;
5. The electronic medical records systems are not yet sophisticated enough for all primary care physicians and specialists to be able to communicate seamlessly with each other.

As a concept of providing care, Medical Home is exciting–and so new, it’s old!