The blog post is the last in our series honoring the AAPACN 2020 Award Winners. We look forward to celebrating with these winners and the 2021 winners next year at the AAPACN 2021 Conference in St. Louis.
2020 Innovation Award Winners
Tammy Kelly, PT, LNHA, RAC-CT, RAC-CTA, and Carrie Tidd, RN, RAC-CT
The Innovation Award honors a member or members demonstrating best practices and innovative solutions in his or her actions and behaviors.
Tammy is the RAI director and Carrie is a manage care specialist at Commonwealth Care of Roanoke (CCR) in Roanoke, Virginia. When CCR and its 12 facilities decided centralize its management care process and create a specialized nurse team focused only on the needs of their manage care population, Tammy and Carrie developed a team of four nurses with experience in case management in both long-term/SNF and acute care with special skills in RAI management, LTC management, and authorization management.
As a result of this change, Tammy and Carrie’s team ensures that the managed care population in their facilities get the benefits they deserve while the facility staff can focus on the immediate care goals and needs of those residents.
As Heather Belcher, RN, BSN, RAC-CT, explained in her nomination of Tammy and Carrie, “Even knowing that this process is centralized at the home office allows the facility staff to focus on the patients and their immediate care needs and goals. The central case management case managers (CMC-CM) can work with the facility team but focus more on the side of the process that is sometimes overlooked — the documentation needs to demonstrate the skill need. Also, the CMC-CM work with the external case managers (insurance) to manage the patient’s skilled benefits and health care needs and goals. The special skills of the CMC-CMs can then be shared throughout the company vs. just to one building.”
Congratulations, Tammy and Carrie, AAPACN 2020 Innovation Award winners!