Improved Health Outcomes in Patients Receiving Health Case Management (HCM)

Background

• The Great-West Life Assurance Company’s (GWL) Health Case Management (HCM) program is designed to assist plan members who have been prescribed certain specialty medications to treat complex or chronic conditions like rheumatoid arthritis or Crohn’s disease.
• Plan members who have been prescribed certain specialty medications are connected with a health case manager, who is a qualified health care professional, to provide ongoing support and monitoring.
• As part of the HCM program, GWL has engaged HealthForward Inc., an industry leader with extensive specialty medication experience and a broad specialty pharmacy and treatment clinic network, to provide a high level of expertise in patient-centred specialty drug management and distribution.

Objective

• To demonstrate that health case management (HCM) administered with routine care delivers better health outcomes than routine care alone 

Conclusions 

• HCM administered with routine care delivers significantly better improvement in RA and PsA patients’ functional ability (measured by HAQ-DI) compared to routine care alone.
• HCM also achieves significantly higher rate of low disease activity, remission and zero-swollen joint count in RA patients.
• This analysis demonstrates the benefit of nurse-led HCM in improving health outcomes over routine care alone, and helps inform future HCM prospective studies.

<sup>1 Innomar Strategies Inc., Oakville, Canada; 2 HealthForward Inc., Oakville, Canada; 3 The Great-West Life Assurance Company, Winnipeg, Canada 
* These authors contributed equally to this work</sup>

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