Models to promote medical health care delivery for indigent families: computerized tracking to case management.

Poor patient/parental medical compliance is one of the most important health care issues of today. Multiple interrelated factors contribute to this problem. Of prime importance is patient/parental maturity and knowledge. Reversal of this process is undoubtably harder than prevention. The cost effectiveness of various methods of intervention is discussed in relation to a large mid-south indigent population. Computerized patient tracking is cost efficient and effectively promotes compliance in a percentage of patients. Its additional utility is the identification and triage of patients, most in need of intervention, to existing social service personnel for family-centered case management. Family-centered case management holds the best hope of reversing the many factors adversely affecting patient compliance. However, this method is costly and requires a low ratio of clients to caseworkers in order to be effective. Community-centered patient management is less costly to implement and is very useful in tightly woven communities resistant to outside intervention. However, this method often has a high client to caseworker ratio and has less utility in dealing with complex medical problems.