Karin VanZant Explains How CareSource Fills the Gaps in Coordinated Care

CareSource is helping to bridge the gap in a patient’s care by working within that space to pull together the various stakeholders and put the patient’s care needs at the forefront of the conversation, said Karin VanZant, executive director of Life Services at CareSource.

Transcript (slightly modified)

When Medicaid beneficiaries are working with multiple organizations and case managers, how do you get all of these entities to work together and coordinate?

From my own personal experience in 20 years of working in this industry, it’s amazing the number of programs that are really out there. I think that all of the programs are very well intentioned. They definitely are meeting some kind of a need but the amount of coordination or even collaboration between them is very limited.

So that’s the space that we’ve decided to fill. Instead of offering our own job training programs or our own housing programs, how do we sit in a space alongside of our member bring all of the resources to the table that they’re already involved with and get everybody on a consistent plan?

I can tell you that most of our community providers have been very open to this response. There have been a few that have been a little leery about especially a health insurance Medicaid plan getting into this space but once we’re able to really kind of talk through how we want to share information, how we want to share successes but mostly how we all have a mission to help this person.

And I talk about Mrs Smtih all the time, her and her 2 kids, and how are we all really pulling together around Mrs Smith and her 2 kids so that she could actually leave the life of subsidy and have a much higher quality of life and prosperity, much that we experience on a regular basis. And when we can put our focus on Mrs Smith and her kids, instead of on what our rules are and our program or what our agency’s mission is or what my paycheck is tied to, we can get much, much further in helping that family.