Care Needs. Often patients and family caregivers do not realize they are in psychological distress and in need of counseling, or medical or psychological support services. Caregivers frequently neglect their own health to focus on that of the patient (Girgis, Lambert, et al. 2013). It was suggested to incorporate a depression-scale measurement tool into the physical symptom management component for psychological assessments using the same 5-point scale to assess depression. If depression increases by 2 points over a specified amount of time, or reaches a grade of >3, the app will auto-send a notification to the healthcare team/social worker informing them of the increase of severity of the symptom, and a consult with a LCSW could be scheduled. Regarding the Spiritual Care Needs component, it was noted that it would be difficult to parse out with respect to the multiplicity of religions as well as those who do not espouse a faith community. As alternatives, it might better serve the patient or caregiver in search of spiritual counseling with the ability to link the website of their home faith community to this component, or to provide them with contact information of a spiritual advisor connected to the app’s palliative care program, or to simply make a request for spiritual counseling and route the request to the program’s counseling center (if one is available). Calendar/Patient Diary Nutrition is very important to patients as they progress through treatment and therapeutic interventions. It was suggested to offer a nutrition log as part of the calendar function for tracking meals, and the ability to set reminders to enter data for this component. Another suggestion for adding functionality to the Calendar component was the ability to track when pharmaceutical patches (ex: pain) are applied. This function could also be tied to symptom management and the medications component, and could be tracked longitudinally providing additional correlative data. It was also suggested to enable text editing on the app, especially the ability to highlight, cut and paste text (similar to that of Kindle). The ability to cut and paste text from a website resource into patient diary would be very helpful, and may facilitate communications between the patient and the healthcare team. Advance Care Planning & Coordination It was suggested to include Advance Care Planning as an additional component in the app. An important foundation to palliative and hospice care – in advance care plannin...
Care Needs. An Assessment o f Alternative Medicaid Managed Care Models by Hill et al. CHAPTER IV Client-Level Care Coordination Services A major focus of HSR’s study addressed Title V roles in providing client-level, or what we also refer to as direct, care coordination services to CSHCN and their families. This section presents the study’s results related to the provision of these services.
