Caseloads

I'm not sure about anyone else, but I don't think I could handle that many cases. I would be satisfied with 30-35 w/c files. I don't think I would be effective with more than that.

OMG, I would never be able to handle that many. In our hospital we have approximately 25-28 cases each. Of course, they are all inpatients at the time. We work alongside Social Workers and Home Health Nurses, have rounds every morning on all the patients to decide on the plan for the day and for the ultimate discharge.

We are a fairly large teaching hospital and are in the process of beefing up our staff so our case loads will be around 20 - 25. Our job responsibilites and accountability are certainly growing so this will be a good number for us. We also have social workers who assist with DCP.

We are a 346 bed city hospital. We each handle 24 to 30 patients. We do not do UR. We have a UR team that handles that as well as several liason's from commercial insurance companies. We handle all aspects of discharge planning and evaluating IS/SI based on InterQual and Milleman guidelines. We have 2 full time social workers who handle the difficult cases and all ETOH and mental illness cases. We do not have a psych unit in our facility. I think 100 to 200 patients is scary. I don't know if that's what your CM's are handling but if they are, you must have a very high turnover. I have 29 and it can get crazy.

Case loads can vary depending upon your job title/duties. I know some CM's at WC insurance carriers have upwards of a 100 cases, however all their work is either telephonic or they out source to field CM's like me. I do field CM in Workers' Comp. My comfortable case load is only 20-25, but you have to take into consideration that I have a lot of travel time in there. At that level, I am easily billing 10-12 hours per day. Also, I find that if the case load gets too high, then I am not able to provide the same high standard of services. Hope this helps.

In my hospital environment 18-25 is the best option, but I can certainly manage 30, but more than that, and I believe the quality of the service we provide goes down. We do have to do UR, plus see each patient within 24 hours of admit, document daily, plus loads of data collection etc. At least we have a boss that actually knows what we do, she used to do this job herself.