IU School of Medicine Complex Care Coordination Technical Assistance Center

The IU School of Medicine Complex Care Coordination Technical Assistance Center is a transdisciplinary team of skilled nurse care coordinators, social workers, clinicians and family representatives. Together they have the advanced expertise to train and support new and curious care coordinators to improve the delivery of patient-and-family-centered care which assesses and addresses the comprehensive needs of patients, families and/or caregivers. Their targeted training curricula focus on serving children with medical complexity and/or adults with intellectual or developmental disabilities (IDD). The center is part of the Department of Pediatrics Division of General and Community Pediatrics.

The technical assistance team’s work includes:

An infrastructure for professionalizing care coordination with formal curricula and professional development coaching to promote job success and advancement and to maintain satisfaction in this field of work.
- Participation in the orientation, the high intensity curriculum and the longitudinal learning collaborative speeds the growth of care coordinator skills to achieve competency in key milestones and provide high quality care.
- Individualized coaching in care coordination processes is reinforced through chart auditing, quality indicator feedback and competency milestone assessment.
- Standardized accurate health system, government, and community service information is synthesized, collated and distributed to care coordinators and families, with semi-annual assessment of family satisfaction.
An infrastructure for building patient/family-centeredness engages patients and families in all levels of the process, using enhanced care coordinator communication skills and the model of Parent Café.
- Collaborates to proactively Identify needs and strengths and incorporate them together into next step actions to accomplish goals.
- Engages the patient and/or family in alignment with their self-advocacy ability to actuate outcomes.
- Refines health care utilization through skill-building in self-management, empowerment and resiliency.
An infrastructure for building advanced medical homes to address chronic care management for patients with medical complexity and IDD, primarily within primary care.
- Delivers frontline tools for care management of key populations.
- Facilitates learning collaboratives with both physician champions and participating clinicians.
An infrastructure for disseminating information and linking stakeholders in care coordination and service delivery across the state.
- Produces and disseminates scholarship across care coordination, patient/family centered care and chronic care management.
- Builds a community of practices of key stakeholders through a statewide advisory committee.

Technical Assistance Team

Mary R. Ciccarelli, MD

Medical Director

Read Bio Mary R. Ciccarelli, MD

Alyssa D. Swick, MD

Assistant Medical Director

Read Bio Alyssa D. Swick, MD

Natasha McClanahan, MSW, LSW

Program Director

Natasha has over 10 years of social work experience ranging from home-based family therapy, medical social work, early childhood systems building and leading quality improvement projects for the State of Indiana. Natasha was the local lead for the Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems grant and lead a team of physicians, case managers, parents, and other community partners to analyze, critique and offer solutions to Indiana’s early childhood system. She has participated as an expert panelist at the Infant Mortality Summit in Indianapolis, presented at the Indiana Chapter National Association of Social Workers on social work’s key role in early childhood systems change, and has coordinated over 15 organizations to be trained on Be Strong Families Parent Café model here in Indianapolis.

Satpreet Dhaliwal

Administrative Financial Manager

Satpreet joined IC4 in 2022 after completing her MHA from Maryville University. Her areas of interest include process improvement, project management, and standardization. She aspires to contribute meaningful work to improve access to care for patients in underserved and vulnerable populations.

Lorena Flaa

Nursing Care Coordination Manager

Lorena has more than 35 years of pediatric nursing experience in hospital, home health, and education environments. The focus of the past ten years of her career has been on care coordination services for children, youth, and adults with special health care needs.

Sam Love, BSN, RN

Nursing Care Coordinator Coach

Sam has more than 35 years of nursing experience working in a variety of settings including transition services for children with special health care needs, home health care, and clinical research and regulatory areas. She strives to improve individualized, comprehensive care for individuals with medical complexity and intellectual and developmental disabilities across the lifespan.

Karen Rundall, MSN, RN

Nursing Care Coordinator Coach

Karen joined IC4 as a Care Coordinator in 2021 then became a Care Coordinator Coach in 2022 after 34 years working as a Pediatric Nurse. Her focus over the past 24 years has been care coordination services for children and youth with special health care needs and serving as the Director over Clinical and Augmentative Services with the KY Office for Children with Special Health Care Needs. Within this position she provided leadership for the Agency’s collaboration with Kentucky’s Department for Community Based Services (DCBS) to provide Nursing consultation for their Medically Complex Foster Care Support program along with grant oversight and supervision for KY Family to Family Health Information Centers and Early Hearing and Detection Intervention programs across Kentucky.

Erika Thomison, LSW, MSW

Parent Café Manager

Erika joined the IC4 team in the spring of 2023. She earned both her Bachelor and Master of Social work degrees from the IU School of Social Work. As a parent of children with complex medical needs, she has spent more than 25 years navigating the world of complex care. Pairing her social work skills, her background knowledge, and her passion for improving systems of care, she hopes to make meaningful contributions towards equitable care for families across the state.

Leadership Team

The leadership team meets biweekly to collaborate on the structure and processes of IC4.

Christine Hennessy

Indiana Family to Family Director of Training

Christine’s role voices the family experience in work groups, committees, coalitions and grant-funded projects aimed at informing program development, training and quality. She leads INF2F HIC by creating and facilitating training, sharing information, 1:1 assistance, advocacy support and resources for children with complex needs. Her perspectives derive from 15+ years of career experience, her youth spent caring for a parent with complex illnesses and as mother to a son with a neurodiverse diagnosis. She has unique insight to the patient and family experience and barriers within health systems.

Kristi Linson, MLD

Indiana Children with Special Healthcare Services Director

Maria Finnell, MD

Indiana FSSA Chief Medical Officer

Cynthia Nassim, MD

Physician Champion at All IN Pediatrics

Laura Thieme, MD

Physician Champion at Witham Pediatrics

Advisory Committee

The IC4 consulting team, currently under development, will meet quarterly to guide the overarching vision of the project.

Contact Information

Resources

Looking for patient care? Pediatric primary care can be reached at the site below.

Riley Primary Care