Care Navigation

The key to complex case management

Care navigation is the heart of what AccessHealth does. An emerging concept in healthcare, care navigation is how we assist our clients in identifying and accessing the range of available services and support they need to stabilize and improve their health and their lives.

The care navigation model goes well beyond connecting people in need to medical services — it includes behavioral health services and social services as well. AccessHealth's care navigators are experts in the full landscape of services, systems and community-wide support that can help our clients address and overcome barriers to care. Indeed, most of the time, AccessHealth's clients will be connected to non-medical care or services in addition to referrals for their medical needs. We helps our clients to first understand and navigate the local ecosystem of programs, services and healthcare providers, and then coordinates their care and treatment. Care navigators function as frontline liaisons between clients and community partners working to improve health outcomes for low-income, uninsured Spartanburg, Cherokee, and Union County residents. The result for AccessHealth clients is holistic care plans that produce better and more sustainable outcomes. 

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An early adopter of the care navigation model, AccessHealth is focused not only on what our clients' health care needs are, but what their barriers to care are. For example, instead of only helping a client with heart disease get an appointment with a physician, we help determine if they have transportation issues that could affect their ability to make it to their appointments, and then discover if they also need to be enrolled in a smoking-cessation program. We also work with our clients to improve their diets through nutrition education. If needed, we enroll them in a program that provides prescription medication assistance. On a case-by-case basis, we determine if our clients need help finding housing, qualifying for SNAP, or jump-starting a job search. We then connect them to the appropriate local organizations or agencies.

AccessHealth's nine care navigators have backgrounds as nurses, community health workers and social workers. Their collective expertise is essential to ensuring clients are able to access the menu of community services that best meet their needs.

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