The Case Manager or Patient Navigator: Providing Support for Cancer Patients During Treatment and Beyond – nccn.com
Patient Navigator LLC highlighted in National Comprehensive Cancer Center article on cancer navigation.
The Patient Navigator Blog
From advice on specific illnesses to tips on how to communicate with your specialists, there’s a wealth of knowledge on the Patient Navigator blog.
Recent Posts
National Association of Healthcare Advocacy Consultants – Present at the Creation
The National Association of Healthcare Advocacy Consultants sets professional goals and provides a clear voice and reasoned opinions on health care policy matters.
H1N1 – To Vaccinate or not to Vaccinate, that is the question…
A parent’s struggle to decide whether or not to give her 8-month old boy the H1N1 vaccination.
Radio Show -What Does A Navigator Do?
If you are interested in hearing the types of things Patient Navigator can do to help you or a loved one, please listen in to this radio show. We welcome your feedback.
Patient Navigator Works with the Elderly and Their Children
Local advocate serves as liaison between hospitalized father and out-of-state children. Patient Navigator was contacted by the adult daughter of an elderly man who was a patient at a top cancer hospital. She requested that our Houston-based navigator Dr. Zorrilla accompany him to his oncologist appointments in order to relay information accurately between the oncology team, her…
Patient Navigator’s Research Empowers Clients to Manage Their Care
Joan’s problems got worse after surgery. We were contacted by a patient who sustained a complication from a neurological surgery. Patient Navigator’s Medical Director consulted various specialists on her behalf by phone and email after the patient’s doctors refused to listen to her concerns. We directed her to the specialists who would be able to…
Patient Navigator Finds the Care and Services that Clients Need
After four years of suffering and multiple misdiagnosis, medical mystery is solved. Emma’s pain began four years ago, with a sudden, sharp pain in her neck. By the time she contacted Patient Navigator, she had spent many thousands of dollars seeking a diagnosis for the unrelenting pain and troubling symptoms that had worsened steadily over…
Patient Navigator Mediates Complicated Family Situations
Starting the end-of-life conversation. Nick’s wife had been very ill with an incurable disease for five years. She had begun to ask about end-of life options, especially hospice and palliative care. Patient Navigator provided Nick and his wife with useful information that they could use to begin a family conversation. We suggested local palliative care…
“Advocates Help Patients Navigate Health Care Maze”
On June 22, NPR reporter Richard Knox aired this story during the “Morning Edition” broadcast. It was an excellent piece profiling efforts by an individual and a volunteer organization to help patients and families get the care they need to navigate our health care and elder care systems. Each time the media does a piece on…
Center for Mind-Body Medicine Training
I attended a four-day training sponsored by the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C. from June 11-14. It is called CancerGuides II and it was extraordinary. During this training, we learned to create safe, effective individualized programs of comprehensive and integrative care for people with cancer and their families. I met hundreds of practitioners…
Lesson 1: Learn the Vocabulary
The doctors and nurses were using words I could not understand. It was September 19, 1998. I was in the emergency room of a large hospital in Falls Church, Virginia. “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Russell, but your daughter has a brain tumor.” It was the first time in my life that I fainted. When…
Digital Solutions for Health Care
I’ve said in previous posts that we must move to digital records. In the past weeks, I’ve heard horror stories about the inability of medical providers to communicate with each other. I personally know that to be true. I recently asked a doctor treating my daughter if he was planning to inform another specialist (separately…
Patient Navigators Guide Us Through the Medical Maze
The March 29, 2009 edition of Parade magazine featured an article about the new specialty of patient navigation. The article highlights some of what navigators can do. For now, the National Cancer Institute has undertaken several pilot projects to train and deploy navigators in medically underserved areas. But as the article also correctly points out, patient navigators…
A Cancer Diagnosis: 10 Things You Need to Know
A cancer diagnosis thrusts patients and their families into an unfamiliar world of doctors, tests and treatment options. They must simultaneously find information, make decisions under pressure, seek the best medical care, cope with family changes, and deal with insurance, financial, employment, caregiver or school issues. Here are 10 suggestions to help you as you…
How Can a Patient Navigator Help You?
If you had your own patient advocate to guide you through illness and aging, what would you want to ask them?