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Compass Care Management LLC, a new company designed to help individuals and families navigate health care services and decisions launched April 1.
Ken Chisholm, president and CEO, together with Melinda Ciesielczyk, who will serve as vice president and chief operating officer, created the company in response to what they see as an ever-increasing need for providing professional, competent assistance to people “navigating” through a health care system that continues to get more complex and confusing.
Chisholm, whose “No Bones About It” column appears in The Press, has more than 30 years of expertise in nursing, orthopedics and surgery. Ciesielczyk’s background includes more than 20 years in the health insurance industry.
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| Ken Chisholm |
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| Melinda Ciesielczyk |
Compass Care Management’s mission is to help clients become informed and collaborate with, not work against, health care providers – physicians, nurses, hospitals, therapists etc., – with the goal of better and more efficient health care delivery, improved patient compliance and understanding and ultimately, better outcomes.
“Health care these days is scary to say the least,” Chisholm said. “It’s not just patients who feel the effects of health care and reform – providers are stressed in many ways over this as well. Diminishing reimbursements, increased patient loads, new and changing regulations lead to increased frustration for physicians, hospitals and other providers. Doctors want to do what they do best – care for patients, and patients want competent delivery of quality health care. “Everyone thinks that they’re their own best advocate, but try being faced with a catastrophic diagnosis or a child who has been diagnosed with a catastrophic injury or some type of pediatric disease – it’s difficult to separate yourself from the emotions that are naturally associated with something like that,” he said.
“We’re not in the business to make decisions for people, but rather to help enable and empower them to make informed decisions for themselves,” Chisholm said. “People, for any number of reasons, want and need someone to be exclusively ‘on their side’ with their individual best interests at heart; someone who can interface with all necessary elements of the health care system on their behalf; someone who is knowledgeable, will think and process information without emotions that can cloud rational thinking, and be there for those who simply ‘don’t know where to turn for help.”
Ciesielczyk adds, “With the ability to access limited and often erroneous information through the Internet, self-diagnosis can be dangerous. Among the various services that the Patient Advocates of CCM provide are research from prominent medical and scholarly databases in order to provide clients with the most accurate and current information available, helping them make well-informed, ‘best-practice’ decisions.
“Taking a deep breath to collect your thoughts and allowing us to investigate options may mean the difference between a major, open radical surgery, for example, and a laparoscopic procedure,” Ciesielczyk said. “With the recent increases in consumer deductibles, coupled with the never-ending rise in health care costs, patients need to be increasingly educated and empowered to understand and make informed decisions about what their best options are, and how they will most effectively spend their health dollars.”
The company also hopes to work with businesses to offer employee health and insurance benefits along with patient advocacy services as part of employee benefits, Chisholm said. “We also hope to offer community education programs at senior centers and other locations,” he added.
Compass Care Management LLC is located at 860 Ansonia St. Suite 5, Oregon. For more information call 419-469-8909 or visit www.healthcare-advocates.org.
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