Medical patients can use a lot of help in managing their treatment, lifestyle needs, mental health services, and social care.

Doctor visit? Got it. Food? Yup. Transportation? Here’s the taxi. Funds to help from the State? Let’s file the forms together. Frustrated? OK, they are jerks at the government office but I know a person who can help us. Which doctor? Everybody loves Dr B and thinks she is terrific. Forget to take a pill? Let’s look up the instructions for that medicine.

Case managers — be they nurses, social workers, peer counselors, other healthcare providers, caregivers, the local religious social services agency — make the health system work. Equitably. Rapidly. Efficiently. Effectively. Masters of greasing the sticky door.

For the masters of multi-tasking, being interrupted, needing to work rapidly, required to document everything, and needing to stay calm and collected what better professional tools than a costume with a cape (and flight capacity) and a mind map to guide the way?

Up up, and away!

I

Case Managers!