Exploring Patient Care Navigation in the Medicare Program

Patient navigation provides support and information to patients and their families to help navigate the complexities of health care services. These programs or services may include providing support and resources to inform clinical patient choices, financial responsibilities, and available social and community services. The goal of this qualitative project was to capture the current state of available patient navigation programs in the published literature at a point in time. The project with RAND included an environmental scan of published literature and four discussions with health care service organizations. RAND searched the published literature in March 2023 for articles describing or evaluating patient navigation programs between 2013 and 2023. Though many patient navigation programs were identified through this publication search, there are likely many more programs operating. The four discussions with health care service organizations were with patient navigation programs in clinical settings.