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Step 1: Assess Your Clinic’s Care Coordination Services
Step 1: Assess Clinic’s Care Coordination Services
All clinics provide some level of care coordination, whether that is having a process for scheduling patients or having a full-time care coordinator to complete referrals. The first step in improving care coordination services is assessing what your clinic is already doing. The first step will utilize the Care Coordination Capacity Checklist.
1. Inventory Existing Care Coordination Elements
Fill out the Care Coordination Capacity Checklist, moving across each row and putting a check next to the elements that best describe your current clinic activities.
This will help assess what services and processes you currently offer and to what degree they are implemented. As you work your way through the list, reflect on what works and what doesn’t.
2. Identify Opportunities for Improvement
Once you complete the checklist, go back through it and identify where there are gaps in services. Unchecked elements or those that fall under the basic or intermediate levels are the areas where you could improve.
Take a couple of minutes to brainstorm your clinic’s priorities and capacity to expand or implement new care coordination services. Consider what you would need in terms of staffing, processes, documentation, etc. Circle 1-3 care coordination elements that would be most feasible to improve on at this time.
Identifying Children with Special Healthcare Needs (CYSHCN)
Identification of the clinic’s CYSHCN (high-needs patients) is an important item on the checklist. It is essential to ensure that your highest needs patients have access to and are linked with necessary services. If this element came up as an area of improvement on the checklist, you may want to consider making it a priority task. We recommend using the CSHCN Screener or the Developmental Screening Toolkit to identify this population.
Care coordination encompasses far more than what we’ve listed in this capacity checklist. You can apply this same framework for assessing capacity and identifying priorities for any service you come across or would like to improve on. Check out the Medical Home Index-Short Version and Stratis Health's Community-Based Care Coordination Maturity Assessment for more examples of care coordination services.
Need Help?
Our experts can provide technical assistance to you through this process. Fill out the Implementation Training and Support Request Form and contact us at BFH-FamilyResourceCenter@la.gov or 504-568-3405 for more information.