NURS6626 asks the culminating question for the care coordination specialization: given everything learned about models, processes, and ethics, can you design, launch, and lead a care coordination program that produces measurable results?
Leading an interdisciplinary care coordination team
NURS6626 covers the specific leadership challenges of managing an interdisciplinary care coordination team — nurses, social workers, community health workers, and pharmacists, each with distinct professional cultures and scopes — building shared goals and mutual respect across professions that don't always naturally see eye to eye on approach or priority.
Building and evaluating a care coordination program
The course requires students to design a care coordination program proposal from the ground up: defining the target population, staffing model, key processes, and — critically — the outcome metrics that will demonstrate the program's value to organizational leadership, since care coordination programs are frequently at risk of budget cuts if they can't clearly demonstrate their impact on cost, quality, or patient experience.
Key topics in NURS6626
- Leading interdisciplinary care coordination teams across distinct professional cultures
- Building shared goals and mutual respect among nursing, social work, and community health roles
- Designing a care coordination program: target population, staffing, and key processes
- Selecting outcome metrics that demonstrate program value to organizational leadership
- Building a business case and securing organizational support for a care coordination program
- Sustaining and scaling a care coordination program over time
Working on a care coordination program proposal or an interdisciplinary leadership paper?
Our nursing experts build NURS6626-level coursework with genuine care coordination leadership depth.
Worked example: outcome metrics for a new care coordination program
- Program: New care coordination program targeting high-risk heart failure patients
- Utilization metric: 30-day all-cause readmission rate, compared to a historical baseline
- Quality metric: Percentage of patients with a completed medication reconciliation within 48 hours of discharge
- Patient experience metric: Patient-reported understanding of their discharge care plan, via a follow-up survey
- Financial metric: Estimated cost savings from avoided readmissions, compared against the program's staffing cost
- Lesson: A defensible program proposal identifies multiple metric types upfront, not just one, since leadership will ask about cost, quality, and patient experience together
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Care coordination program design and leadership assignments.
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Frequently asked questions
Nurses, social workers, community health workers, and pharmacists each bring distinct professional training, ethical frameworks, and cultural norms about how care should be approached — a social worker's training emphasizes psychosocial context and systems-level barriers, a pharmacist's training emphasizes medication safety and pharmacology, and a nurse's training emphasizes clinical assessment and care management, meaning the same patient situation can genuinely be seen differently depending on professional lens. NURS6626 teaches that effective interdisciplinary leadership requires actively building shared understanding and mutual respect across these different professional perspectives — creating structured opportunities (case conferences, shared documentation, explicit team charters) for each discipline's expertise to be heard and integrated, rather than one discipline's perspective implicitly dominating decision-making by default. Leaders who don't actively manage this cross-professional dynamic often find their teams experiencing quiet friction or disengagement from team members who feel their professional expertise isn't being genuinely incorporated into care decisions.
Care coordination programs represent a real organizational investment — staffing, training, technology — and without predefined outcome metrics established at the program's design stage, there's no reliable baseline to measure improvement against once the program launches, and no agreed-upon definition of success that leadership and the program team both understand and are working toward. NURS6626 teaches that programs which wait until they're already running to figure out how to measure their impact often struggle to demonstrate value when budget review time comes, either because the necessary baseline data was never captured before the program started, or because the program team and organizational leadership end up disagreeing about which metrics actually matter after the fact. Defining metrics upfront — and ensuring baseline data is captured before the program begins — is what allows a care coordination program to make a credible, evidence-based case for its continued funding and potential expansion, rather than relying on anecdotal impressions of whether it's "working."