LITTLE ROCK, ARK. – JULY 2007 – The Case Management Society of America (CMSA) has awarded the third annual Award of Excellence in Adherence Management (AEAM) to Hudson Health Plan (HHP) of Tarrytown, N.Y. The 2007 award was presented at CMSA’s 17th annual conference held June 19–23, in Denver, Colo., to acknowledge HHP's innovations for improving the quality of care received by the organization's members. HHP's President and CEO Georganne Chapin came to Denver to accept the award and the check.

“‘Hudson Health Plan’s mission is ‘to promote and provide access to excellent health services for all people,’ and we support innovations that can improve the quality of care received by members,” said Chapin. “The CMAGTracker has profoundly changed the way our nurse case managers work, giving them new tools and techniques to assess compliance and uncover problems that might have gone undetected in the past."

Since it's inception in 2005, the AEAM has been supported through an unrestricted educational grant from Pfizer. This national case management award is designed to spotlight excellence in applying CMSA's Case Management Adherence Guidelines (CMAG) and use of the CMAGTracker, a web-based collection tool for documenting patient encounters and improvements in outcomes through use of the CMAG Guidelines.

A not-for-profit Medicaid managed care organization, HHP provides free and low-cost health insurance to over 65,000 members in New York’s Hudson Valley. Eight nurse case managers assisted by 10 bilingual assistants, work under the Vice President for Clinical Services to manage patients with diabetes, asthma, HIV/AIDS, lead-poisoning, disabilities, complex and special needs, as well as perinatal programs and services for expectant mothers.

HHP has had a rigorous case management outreach program since 1998, but until last year, there was no standalone case management application, nor did the team have a tracking tool for members’ medications. Nurse case managers would inquire about medication, but did not make it the focus of their intervention. They kept handwritten notes on member medication use or made notations in a non-reportable data field in the utilization management system, neither of which made the data retrievable in any meaningful way.

CMSA member and past director, Margaret (Peggy) Leonard, MS, RN, C, FNP, Cm,  Vice President for Clinical Services at Hudson Health Plan, credits CMAGTracker for helping Hudson Health Plan to get to the root of compliance problems faster. “We can reach insights with two questions that used to take five,” she explains.

HHP found three CMAG tools to be particularly effective and now uses them to manage cases outside the pilot program:

1. Motivational Interviewing
2. The Readiness Ruler
3. The Modified Morisky Scale

Currently, HHP is conducting a pilot CMAG program with approximately 100 members living with diabetes. The clinical team is very excited about the project and is hoping to gather outcome data that will support the effectiveness of CMAG’s many beneficial tools.

Open only to CMSA members who have attended a CMAG training workshop, the AEAM includes a $1,500 cash award and a commemorative plaque. A CMSA advisory committee selects applicants for the AEAM who complete the following requirements:

1. Registration for the online CMAG Tracker system
2. Entering of assessment data from at least one patient into the system and completing a full patient assessment
3. Submission of a descriptive essay on the applicant's activities to improve patient adherence to prescribed medications using skills or strategies learned in a CMSA CMAG workshop.

For more AEAM information, click here or contact Jason Barnhart at (501)673-1115 or at jbarnhart@acminet.com. The 2008 Award of Excellence in Adherence Management entry deadline is February 29, 2008.