Case Management: Service or Symptom?

ers, nurses, physicians, and other pro fessionals say they are providing case management, but their definitions vary considerably. Reasons for providing case management are diverse, as are settings and targeted population groups. Most likely, few targeted groups relish being called a "case" or being "managed." Therefore, an assortment of more palatable terms is being used interchangeably with case manage ment: care management, managed care, care coordination, case coordina tion, continuing care coordination, con tinuity coordination, service integra tion, and service coordination (Secord, 1987). Regardless of what social work ers call it, there is a need to understand the basic case management concept and its implications for the profession. Case management is a theme throughout professional practice, and the literature is exploding with articles and books that describe case manage ment program models (Fisher & Weisman, 1988; Kane, 1988;MacAdam et al., 1989; Moore, 1990; Secord, 1987; Simmons & White, 1988; Weil, Karls, & Associates, 1985). In almost every setting in public and private health and human services arenas, social workers perform case manager roles, supervise case managers, or coordi nate their actions with others who pro vide case management. These activi ties are as likely to happen in the public social welfare bureaucracy (Harris, 1987) as they are in hospitals (Netting & Williams, 1989), private nonprofit delivery systems, and for-profit arenas (Secord, 1987). This article briefly describes case management, its history, and its many contemporary models. References lead the reader to more in-depth sources of information about designing and de veloping case management programs. The primary purpose of this article is to F. Ellen Netting