Regular Benchmarks Buyer? — Save $500 annually with our Benchmarks Subscription. Click here for details.

Case management continues to evolve to meet ever-changing healthcare demands, with many organizations embedding case managers within primary care practices, hospitals, and home care settings to expand the reach of care coordination and manage healthcare spend.

Cognizant of embedded case management's impact on healthcare outcomes, utilization and cost, two-thirds of healthcare companies embed or co-locate case managers at points of care, according to 2014 market research by the Healthcare Intelligence Network (HIN).

2014 Healthcare Benchmarks: Embedded Case Management provides actionable data from 125 healthcare organizations leveraging embedded or co-located case management to improve healthcare quality, outcomes and spend—including those who apply a hybrid embedded case management approach.

Presented in dozens of easy-to-follow graphs and tables, this report drills down to hospital and health plan sector trends in embedded case management while documenting the following metrics:

• Trends in existing embedded case management programs;
• Care sites for embedded case managers;
• Populations assigned to embedded case managers, with data on the newly discharged, super utilizers, and others;
• Tools and approaches for stratifying individuals for embedded case management;
• Drivers for embedding and co-locating case managers within care sites;
• Responsibilities and average case loads of embedded case managers;
• The most effective tools, protocols and work flows in use by embedded case managers — in respondents' own words, including electronic health records (EHRs), telemedicine, registries, home visits and more;
• Challenges, benefits and ROI attributed to case management colocation;
• Preferred backgrounds, experience and certifications for embedded case managers;
• Tactics to evaluate the performance of embedded case managers and program impact;
• Impact of embedded case management on key healthcare benchmarks — patient satisfaction, hospital readmissions, self-management, total cost of care, and much more;
• Successes achieved with embedded case management;
• Details on future co-located case management initiatives;
• The complete November 2014 Embedded Healthcare Case Management survey tool;

This report also shares highlights from embedded case management initiatives at Caldwell UNC Health Care, where case managers are embedded with primary care and employer sites; and Sentara Medical Group, whose highly successful hybrid approach to co-located case management utilizes case managers during home visits, in the hospital, in the primary care provider office, on the phone or online via Skype or FaceTime virtual sessions.

The 40-page 2014 Healthcare Benchmarks: Embedded Case Management is part of the HIN Healthcare Benchmarks series, which provides continuous qualitative data on industry trends to empower healthcare companies to assess strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to improve by comparing organizational performance to reported metrics.