Care Connect
At HCA Midwest Health, we are always looking for way to improve your healthcare experience. Check out our Care Connect programs for helpful resources and information.
Care Connect
Our programs are designed to make healthcare easier to navigate, connect you to the right care at the right time and help keep you and your loved ones out of the emergency room.
Care Connect Info
At HCA Midwest, we are always looking for ways to improve healthcare. That's why we created Care Connect. Care Connect programs are designed to:
- Make healthcare easier to navigate
- Connect you to the right care at the right time
- Help keep you and your loved ones out of the emergency room
Care Assure
Care Assure, part of HCA Midwest Health's larger Care Connect initiative, is the area's only patented healthcare program designed to help detect potential future emergencies and prevent them by connecting you to the care you need.
Detecting potential emergencies
Using our patented information technology system, Care Assure, we're able to automatically screen the results of tests already being performed during an emergency, inpatient or outpatient visit to identify warning signs and prevent emergencies like a heart attack or a stroke.
By analyzing data from across HCA Healthcare, we determined potential health issues that could increase your chance of a future ER visit. Currently, we use your tests and medical information to screen for:
- Moderate to severe aortic and mitral heart valve conditions
- Low heart function (ejection fraction)
- Moderate to severe arrhythmias
- Congestive heart failure diagnosis
- No primary care physician and over 50 years old
- An increased body mass index and no primary care doctor
- Lung nodules greater than 6mm
- Vascular disease of the carotid, arterial and aortic areas including stenosis, occlusion, insufficiency, DVT, ischemia, aneurysm and dissection.
- Spine disease including degenerative, tumor, infection and injury (currently screened at Lee’s Summit Medical Center and Menorah Medical Center)
Care Assure only utilizes the information from the tests used to diagnose your current health issue, as well as provided medical information, to screen for other conditions that may put you at risk for a future health concern or emergency. Only the conditions and factors listed above are currently included in the program.
Care Assure incidental lung nodule screening is offered at all of our seven HCA Midwest Health hospital locations for patients who present in the ER as well as inpatient and outpatient settings. Utilizing innovative technologies, we are able to detect suspicious lung nodules by analyzing CT exams for the presence of incidental lung nodules which could represent a malignancy.
Your personal healthcare assistant
If test results indicate you're at risk for a potential emergency, a specially trained nurse navigator will contact you. Your dedicated nurse navigator can help connect you to the crucial follow-up care you'll need to help prevent a future emergency.
He or she can help:
- Ensure you understand your discharge instructions, treatment plan and any necessary medications
- Recommend resources to help you lower the cost of prescriptions
- Help you find doctors, specialists, and schedule any necessary appointments
- Explain test results, answer any questions and provide education about conditions and treatments
Data shows that only about 21% of people remember what they were told while in the hospital. Care Assure Nurse Navigators help patients understand their hospital discharge instructions and assist in getting the right follow up care.
Treatment from leading cardiologists
The cardiologists at the HCA Midwest Health Heart and Vascular Institute are committed to improving your health and quality of life. We offer the latest treatments and provide cutting-edge, evidence-based care.
Our cardiology team includes internationally renowned researchers with tremendous clinical experience and expertise. They will collaborate with you and the other subspecialists to design a personalized treatment plan—one that gives you the best possible results and respects your care preferences. See why more people choose us to care for their heart and find a cardiologist.
Extending and improving life
By detecting a potential emergency and connecting you to the right care, we can help prolong your life and improve the quality of the years you live. Through clinical research, we are able to measure how the proactive, early identification and treatment of disease through Care Assure can extend and enhance life. In only three and half years, we have given people in Kansas City back over 3,600 quality years of life.
(Data: July 2015 through Dec 2018)
Discover More Care Connect services
ER follow up appointment
After an ER visit, getting the right follow-up care is critical to your recovery. To ensure you're connected to the care you need, we offer a free follow-up appointment service for select diagnoses.
Oncology navigation
Being diagnosed with cancer can be overwhelming. At Sarah Cannon Cancer Institute at HCA Midwest Health, our oncology-trained Nurse Navigators help guide you or your loved one through their cancer journey.
Meet our Care Assure team
Tamra Fisher, MSM RDCS
Division Director
25+ years in healthcare
“The complexity of healthcare post discharge can be overwhelming for patients and families. Care Assure allows the opportunity for an advocate to support them through their journey. Our tenured team of healthcare professionals is committed to ensuring a positive post discharge experience.”
Leslie Linzy, RN, BSN
Division Manager
10+ years in healthcare and 10 years in the non-profit community
“As a Care Assure navigator with the opportunity to help manage a dedicated team of navigators has shown me how critical the Care Assure program is for patients in the time between their inpatient stay and their outpatient follow up. Our team is critical to the continuum of care for patients.”
Carolyn Lusby, RN, BSN
Menorah Medical Center
30+ years of nursing experience
"I love being about to take some of the stress off my patients. It helps them be able to focus on healing and getting back to their normal routine."
Diane Marie Alonso, RN BSN
Research Medical Center
8 Years of nursing experience
"A new diagnosis, multiple testing procedures and a hospital stay can be frightening and overwhelming! I love to provide continued support to our patients with encouragement and compassion. The hospital discharge is only the beginning of their health care journey. Our job is to form a bridge between their hospital stay and on-going wellness with education, resources and connections to care."
Doria Hamm, RN, BSN
Research Medical Center
Over 15 years of nursing experience
"The most rewarding part is providing education to patients with chronic health conditions and helping them identify self-management techniques to keep them healthy with the best quality of life possible."
Heather Bridges, RN, BSN
Overland Park
17 years of Nursing Care
"My favorite part about being a Care Assure Nurse Navigator is the bond I have the opportunity to form not just with the patient, but with their family members. Not only am I working with and educating the patient, but with each patient experience, I learn something new!
Heather Gerdeman, RN BSN
Centerpoint Medical Center
7 years of nursing experience
"I love to advocate and educate patients when they need it the most. I love being the resource that they can count on and be there for them. Patient's being discharged from the hospital can be very overwhelming. I help them navigate when they get home and make them feel that they are still having continuing of care, even after the hospital stay."
Kathy Werner, RN, BSN
Lee's Summit Medical Center & Lafayette Regional Health Center
20+ years of nursing experience
"I love the point in a conversation with a patient when it seems to ‘click'. They were in the hospital, often times with a new illness, and are so overwhelmed with new information. It is very rewarding to hear a patient say ‘that all makes sense now.'"
Shelly Kohman, RN, BSN
Overland Park Regional Medical Center
15+ years of nursing experience
"The most rewarding part is making a difference in patients' lives, and knowing they still remember me and call me months (and sometimes years) later for questions, appointments or just to say hi."
Caitlyn Beckham, RN BSN
Lung Nodule Nurse Navigator
5+ years of experience as an oncology nurse
“I enjoy the opportunity to connect with patients and families to explain test results and necessary follow up. They are so grateful to know someone is focusing on their needs and that the navigator will help coordinate care and answer all of their questions.”
Wendy Cass, R.T. (R) (CT) (MR) (ARRT)
Lung Nodule Navigator
Over 20 years of radiology experience
“We welcome the opportunity to work with patients and physicians in the management of lung nodules detected through our hospital CT scans. It is our goal to strive to be a friendly voice patients and their families hear when it’s time for follow up imaging, appointments, and procedures. We hope that through our navigation we help to ease patient’s needs and concerns.”
Once you are in the Care Assure program, our care coordinators will be the people reaching out to help schedule any needed follow-up appointments.
Betty Barnes
Over 18 years of healthcare experience
"The most rewarding part is hearing relief in the voices of patients and their families when we have been able to schedule all of their appointments and they did not have to make any phone calls."
Vanessa Betts
Over 15 years of healthcare experience
"Being given the opportunity to be a helping hand to someone every day is a rewarding feeling. Families are so grateful for our support."
Meet our patients
See how the Care Assure preventive care program helps improve the lives of these Kansas City residents.
Emergency care
Rick Osborne
Cardiology
Robert Cuthbertson
Care Connect - Lung nodule and jung screening