Care Management Nurse to Enrollee Ratios for ACOs and the Importance of the "Soft" Side of the Nurse-Patient Relationship

We'll talk diabetes in a sec Mrs Smith,
but first, how's those darling kids?

Just being back from a whirlwind tour, the Disease Management Care Blog is happy to report that it became newly acquanted with some colleagues who are furiously at work building care management programs for newly minted integrated health systems and ACO wannabes.

They provided two big insights for the DMCB:

1) While the DMCB guesstimated that the typical ratio of care management nurses to enrollees amongthe mainstream care management service companies was in the range of 1:1500, at least two new programs are using a 1:750 ratio.  By the way, 1:800 is what was quoted in this peer reviewed article.  That's a lot of nurses for an "accountable" population and a lot of budget for a CFO to approve. 

2) There is less of an emphasis on care manager "productivity,"  thanks to a recognition that nurse-client conversations outside hard nosed chronic illness management "engagement," "barrier identification" and "shared decision making" contribute to relationship building.  The DMCB thinks of this as "magic nursing dust" that adds to the likelihood of patient behavior change.  There are no hard data on the topic, but it's important in other parts of the health care universe, so why not here?