Blog

The Secrets of Successful Chronic Care Management Training and Onboarding

Chronic Care Management (CCM) can help you provide ongoing, preventative care to your Medicare patients. CCM patients receive 20 minutes of support with managing their chronic conditions every month, reducing their risk of hospital readmissions and emergency room visits.
But CCM training and onboarding isn’t easy. 

Even if your practice collaborates with a CCM partner, you’ll still need a comprehensive onboarding process to offer CCM successfully. Here, we’ll break down tips that ChartSpan has learned while successfully onboarding thousands of customers—most of them in 45 days or less. 

1. Request a clear timeline

It’s essential to know exactly how long onboarding will take, as well as which milestones need to be achieved to complete the process. ChartSpan’s onboarding typically takes 45 calendar days from contract signature to go-live.

However, we consult with practices before onboarding begins to confirm that timeline aligns with their goals and internal initiatives. Flexibility is crucial for a successful partnership, so both organizations should have the opportunity to provide input.

Additionally, it’s important to find a CCM partner who will establish regular meeting times and schedule training sessions that work for your team. If your partner doesn’t offer a timeline and plan critical meetings before the process begins, onboarding is likely to drag on. 

2. Look for frequent, personalized support

Your providers and practice staff will need to be involved in launching a CCM program. But most practices strive to minimize the amount of heavy lifting their providers and staff are forced to do.

Look for a CCM partner who will handle the majority of the onboarding process and who is able to clearly outline which aspects of onboarding require your assistance and when. If your partner only gives you a few, manageable tasks throughout the project, you can keep the onboarding process moving without taking time away from your patients. 

Your CCM partner should also take your practice’s requests into account, both for onboarding and for your CCM program as a whole. For onboarding, the major concerns will be choosing who needs to be involved in training and the dates when training sessions or calls will take place. For your CCM program, they’ll need to consider the personalized needs of you and your patients. 

Early in the process of choosing a CCM partner, ask who on their team will provide you with personalized onboarding support. 

3. Ask about integrations and data management

Chronic Care Management software comes with technical requirements that many other softwares don’t. In particular, integration with the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and the ability to securely access patient eligibility information are important.

Search for a partner who asks about your EHR and shares information about integrations early in the sales process, before onboarding begins. Ensure they are able to access and transmit data securely so your patients’ information is protected, and ask whether your staff will have to bear the burden of the integration process or whether your partner will handle it for you. 

4. Involve the right people 

Which staff members participate in training and how often depends on the setup of your practice. Some large health systems may need to include multiple executives and departments, while small practices may have just a practice manager and a few staff members. 

Your CCM partner should be able to guide you through the specific input they need, so you can determine which people need to be involved at what stages of the process. For example, your IT team may need to join meetings early on to work on integrations, but will not need to be involved later. Your providers might only need to attend a single session. 

You’ll also want to look for a partner with a strong team of their own. A well-prepared CCM  partner will have pre-implementation, implementation/onboarding, client success, and Quality team members dedicated to onboarding and responding to your questions and concerns. 

5. Incorporate quality measures and quality support from the beginning

A successful CCM program includes an experienced Quality team, who can help you with MIPS, MIPS Value Pathways, ACOs, and other quality programs your practice is involved with. It’s important that the Quality team is involved early in the CCM training and onboarding process, so you can collaborate on which quality measures you want to emphasize from the beginning.

CCM has the potential to improve many of your quality measures, including your rates of cancer screenings and vaccinations and your patients’ blood pressure and A1C readings. But this improvement will happen most quickly if Quality is involved in the early stages of CCM training. 

6. Seek out marketing and enrollment support

An unsuccessful CCM program will leave your staff to perform enrollment and explain CCM to patients on your own. A successful program will provide extensive marketing and enrollment support.

Before choosing a CCM provider, ask what forms of marketing, education, and enrollment assistance they offer. Then, when you’ve chosen a provider and started onboarding, you can share which marketing materials you’d like to use with your onboarding specialist.

Some practices value waiting-room posters or brochures, while others prefer to send personalized emails or messages using their EHR. Other methods of educating patients include adding information about CCM to your website or your social media profiles and recording voicemails for eligible patients. Your CCM provider should be willing to help with these efforts. 

7. Understand the financial aspects of CCM

A reputable CCM vendor won’t charge up-front fees for implementation and onboarding. But, equally importantly, they will provide a clear financial picture of CCM expectations.

Before onboarding starts, your partner should have shared the CCM reimbursements for your practice and your state, the fees they will collect, and your estimated revenue. After onboarding begins, they will ideally keep you informed by sharing how many of your patients may be eligible for CCM and how much of a co-insurance payment they will have. 

During the onboarding process, you should also receive training and written guidance on how to bill for CCM so you don’t miss out on the reimbursements your practice has earned. 

8. Establish where to find ongoing training and support

Your CCM training shouldn’t end on your program’s go-live date. Although you will hopefully have all the information you need to launch a program, your practice may change staff as the years progress, or you may need changes to your CCM enrollment and clinical processes.

Before onboarding is over, ask your CCM partner if they provide ongoing support. You should receive the contact information for a dedicated representative, as well as self-service documents you can reference for questions or additional training. Ensure you can find these materials and that you have all the contact information you need before onboarding ends. 

Conquer Chronic Care Management training and onboarding

Chronic Care Management is a complex program, with an array of compliance requirements. Launching a new program can be overwhelming, especially if your practice’s staff are already overworked.

By incorporating the onboarding tips we’ve shared above, you can successfully launch your CCM program, serve your patients, and establish a recurring source of reimbursements. And if you’d like to learn how to achieve CCM success once onboarding is over, check out our list of 5 Obstacles to Successful CCM and How to Overcome Them.

With special thanks to Brianna Ryan and Chasiti Hampton