Education and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in psychology, social work, nursing, or a related health and human services field is required. Associate's degree: May substitute 2 years of directly related experience in psychiatry admissions for Bachelor's degree. HS Diploma: May substitute 4 years of directly related experience in psychiatry admissions for Bachelor's degree.
• One-year experience in a hospital or psychiatric treatment setting is preferred.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Strong critical-thinking and problem-solving skills required to manage referrals and patient flow: matching individual patient needs to the right bed at the right time in the context of overall service demand and availability of resources.
• Effectively manage competing priorities with high reliability and attention to detail.
• Interact and communicate effectively verbally and in writing with patients, potential patients, and healthcare professionals in stressful situations while maintaining calm, courteous, exemplary customer service.
• Accurate documentation and stewardship of protected health information.
• Familiarity with psychiatric illnesses including working knowledge of DSM/ICD diagnostic categories and disorders and psychotropic medications commonly used in treatment of psychiatric illnesses and substance use disorders.
• General familiarity with levels of psychiatric care available at UMMS and in the community. Direct callers seeking psychiatry treatment to appropriate resources, including callers in crisis.
• Learn and maintain working knowledge of legal and regulatory requirements of hospital-based health care, transfers between health care facilities, patient rights, legal guardianship, procedures for emergency petitions and emergency psychiatric evaluations, voluntary and involuntary psychiatry admissions, involuntary admission hearings, and clinical review panel/forced medication processes.
• Learn and maintain working knowledge of insurance prior authorization processes, including third party payor rules and clinical criteria for inpatient, partial hospitalization, and intensive outpatient levels of care.
• Proficient in the use of technology to support communication, review of records, and documentation. Requires daily use of telephone, fax, email, secure text messaging, internet navigation including third party online portals, Microsoft Office applications, and electronic medical records system (Epic).