Associate I, Medical Social Work

Job Summary

Provides effective client care by utilizing foundational knowledge to conduct psychosocial assessments, diagnostic impressions, and interventions for individuals, couples, families, and groups, and sharing results with management. Collaborates with interdisciplinary teams to develop individualized care plans, address social service needs, and execute social work service plans. Communicates guidance to patients regarding treatment plans and resources and participates in referrals to appropriate services. Manages a caseload of patients with low to medium psychosocial acuity by collaborating with clinical teams, implementing care coordination improvements, and ensuring accurate documentation of treatment plans and follow-up appointments. Adheres to case management policies and suggests improvements while ensuring compliance with organizational, state, and federal guidelines. Supports program development by evaluating social work programs, identifying new development opportunities, and independently updating industry knowledge to recommend system and process enhancements.

Essential Responsibilities

• Pursues effective relationships with others by proactively providing resources, information, advice, and expertise with coworkers and members. Listens to, seeks, and addresses performance feedback; provides mentoring to team members. Pursues self-development; creates plans and takes action to capitalize on strengths and develop weaknesses; influences others through technical explanations and examples. Adapts to and learns from change, challenges, and feedback; demonstrates flexibility in approaches to work; helps others adapt to new tasks and processes. Supports and responds to the needs of others to support a business outcome.
• Completes work assignments autonomously by applying up-to-date expertise in subject area to generate creative solutions; ensures all procedures and policies are followed; leverages an understanding of data and resources to support projects or initiatives. Collaborates cross-functionally to solve business problems; escalates issues or risks as appropriate; communicates progress and information. Supports, identifies, and monitors priorities, deadlines, and expectations. Identifies, speaks up, and implements ways to address improvement opportunities for team.
• Provides effective client care by leveraging foundational knowledge to provide psychosocial assessment, diagnostic impressions, interventions with individuals/couples/families/groups, and prevention of psychosocial dysfunction/disability/impairment including emotional/mental/behavioral disorders, sharing results with management; collaborating with interdisciplinary teams when conducting psychosocial assessment, including functional status and financial resources to develop an individualized care plan, determine interventions needed, and discuss social service needs; communicating and providing guidance with patients to share results to discuss social work and treatment plans, provide resources, and answer questions; executing social work service plans, applying feedback when appropriate; and participating in the referral of members, patients, and staff to the appropriate services and sharing information with providers.
• Coordinates the care of a caseload of patients with low to medium psychosocial acuity by collaborating with the clinical team to disseminate treatment plans to patients and providers; identifying and implementing potential recommendations to improve care coordination; acquiring and applying knowledge of guidelines and protocols to recommend patient referrals; adhering to case management policies and procedures and suggesting improvements to promote member utilization and engagement of services; and ensuring documentation of patient treatment plans and follow-up appointments.
• Supports compliant services by learning and complying with organizational, state, and federal guidelines as well as regulatory policies, standards, and procedures, and having awareness of when to escalate compliance-related/regulatory concerns; and maintaining and submitting written and electronic documentation, records, and reports (e.g., charting) according to department, federal, and state regulations, with little to no guidance.
• Supports program development and management by helping to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of social work programs and identifying opportunities for new program development; and independently staying up-to-date with industry best practices and new treatment options to recommend and help implement improvements to systems and processes for outcome management as well as social work programs or protocols.