What is a Healthcare Advocate?

Managing healthcare can quickly become overwhelming. Between understanding Medicare benefits, dealing with insurance questions, scheduling appointments, finding the right providers, and keeping multiple doctors on the same page, patients and their families often end up doing far more coordination than they expected.

That’s where a healthcare advocate (sometimes referred to as a healthcare navigator or patient advocate) can help.

A patient advocate is an experienced healthcare professional who helps you navigate the healthcare system and makes sure important details don’t fall through the cracks. Instead of trying to figure everything out on your own, you have someone in your corner who understands how the system works and can help you determine what to do next.

If managing your healthcare has started to feel like a job of its own, working with a patient advocate can give you an experienced partner to help make the process simpler and more manageable.

What does a Healthcare Advocate Do?

Onit Navigation provides personalized healthcare advocacy and navigation for individuals who qualify for its services. Their team helps patients better understand their care, overcome obstacles, and coordinate the many moving pieces that can come with managing healthcare.

Depending on your needs, an Onit advocate may be able to help you:

• Better understand your healthcare coverage and benefits
• Work through insurance or coverage-related issues
• Find appropriate doctors, specialists, and healthcare resources
• Schedule and prepare for medical appointments
• Coordinate communication between providers
• Organize and understand your care plan and next steps
• Reduce the time and frustration of navigating the healthcare system on your own

What makes this type of service especially valuable is having a knowledgeable person focused on you. Your advocate can help you ask the right questions, understand your options, and stay organized as your healthcare needs change.

Does Medicare Cover the Cost of An Advocate?

For Medicare beneficiaries who qualify, Onit Navigation’s advocacy services may be available at no additional cost to the patient. 

Why Does Medicare Cover the Cost of An Advocate?

Healthcare works better when someone is helping connect the dots.

For many Medicare beneficiaries, especially those managing multiple doctors, prescriptions, chronic conditions, or recent changes in their health, the challenge isn’t simply having coverage. It’s making sure that care actually happens the way it’s supposed to.

That’s where patient advocacy and care navigation can make a meaningful difference.

An advocate can help identify missed follow-ups, coordinate between providers, address medication or insurance issues, and make sure patients understand what they need to do next. Better coordination can lead to better outcomes—and can help prevent small healthcare issues from becoming much bigger, more expensive ones.

Better support can lead to better care

At Plan Medicare, we see this firsthand. We can help our clients understand their Medicare coverage and make informed decisions about their insurance, but many of the challenges they encounter after enrollment extend beyond their Medicare plan.

That’s one of the reasons we partnered with Onit Navigation.

Onit helps eligible Medicare beneficiaries with the practical, day-to-day challenges of navigating healthcare. Their team can help coordinate care, communicate with providers, address insurance and billing questions, manage appointments and follow-ups, and help patients stay on top of their healthcare.

That support can make care:

• More coordinated: Fewer gaps between doctors, specialists, medications, tests, and treatment plans
• More timely: Better follow-through on appointments, referrals, prescriptions, and next steps
• Less overwhelming: Someone is there to help with the calls, questions, paperwork, and coordination
• More effective: Patients are better equipped to understand their care and follow the treatment plans recommended by their providers

For Medicare, supporting better care coordination can also help reduce avoidable complications and unnecessary healthcare utilization. For patients and their families, the benefit is much more personal: healthcare becomes easier to understand, easier to manage, and less likely to fall entirely on their shoulders.

That’s ultimately what makes Onit such a natural extension of what we do at Plan Medicare. We help our clients navigate Medicare coverage. Onit helps them navigate the healthcare that comes after it.

Why Did Plan Medicare Partner with Onit?

At Plan Medicare, our relationship with clients doesn’t end once they enroll in a Medicare plan. We want our clients to feel supported when they actually have to use their healthcare, too.

That’s why we partnered with Onit Navigation.

Many of the people we work with are managing more than just Medicare. They may be coordinating care between several doctors, helping a spouse with medical needs, trying to understand an unexpected bill, searching for an in-network specialist, dealing with a pharmacy, or spending hours calling insurance companies and doctors’ offices.

Those are important problems—but they aren’t always problems a Medicare insurance agent can solve.

Onit fills that gap.

Their care navigators can help with the day-to-day work of managing healthcare: calling doctors and insurance companies, reviewing bills and coverage questions, coordinating appointments and referrals, arranging transportation, helping with prescriptions, and keeping the details of a person’s care organized in one place.

We chose to partner with Onit because their service complements what we already do for our clients. Plan Medicare helps you make informed decisions about your Medicare coverage. Onit helps you navigate the healthcare system that comes with it.

For many eligible Medicare beneficiaries, Onit’s services are covered by Medicare and most members pay nothing out of pocket.

Partnering with Onit allows us to provide another layer of support—especially for clients and families who could use someone to help manage the calls, paperwork, coordination, and follow-through that can make healthcare so overwhelming.

What Onit Helps You Do

How Onit Works

Onit’s process is very simple. It starts with a brief introductory call to make sure you qualify for their services.