UMass Medical School

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Certificate Program for Care Managers and Navigators

The Patient Centered Medical (or Healthcare) Home is sweeping the nation. It holds out the promise of being able to bring the proven individual and population health benefits of primary care to many more people by making primary care more comfortable and convenient for patients, by teaching teamwork so that physicians and other primary care providers will be happy going into this work, and by allowing payment to reward the provider and support the team by including a portion of the proven savings in overall cost in the pool for compensation.

Care management is a crucial part of the PCMH. It is the role that can change a passive health system that waits for the client/patient to be involved into an active and engaging health system. When the system is more engaging, patients are more likely to be engaged to improve their health. CM is central to the success of the PCMH. Care Management can be targeted at people coping with chronic illnesses that put their health and/or social functioning at risk. Chronic illnesses are sometimes defined as “physical” like diabetes, or “mental” like schizophrenia and substance abuse, but for the purposes of this definition, we will call them all “chronic illnesses”. Expertise in both the care management tasks of the healthcare world and the mental health world is necessary to do the job.

In practice, Care Management, the active outreach to engage patients/clients and help them use services, is particularly applicable in situations where the engagement between the person and the health system is likely to fail: transitions of care, barriers to access, poor fit between the person’s social skills or medical understanding and the level of either required to maintain health or to access care.

To be successful, Care Managers need to develop general skills at engaging patients, promoting their activation to improve their own health, and general medical and behavioral health skills to be able to connect them to appropriate services, to address questions, to teach healthy living and support treatment plans.

The training program consists of 20 modules, each of one hour, delivered in 10 sessions of two hours each. Below are the topics of the modules. Tuition is $800 per person.