Care Navigators: A Mini Case Study

One health system has trained cohorts of bilingual care navigators to successfully engage patients in the emergency department and other hospital units. Working seven days a week, care navigators facilitate hospital discharge and follow-ups for 80 or more patients with congestive heart failure and pneumonia each month. They also initiated a program to call discharged patients needing rehabilitation, routinely reaching three out of four patients. Care navigators also took over maternity follow-up calls from nurses, increasing call-completion rates by as much as 62 percent a month.