Patients using off-base hospitals in South Korea will soon receive help from newly hired Tricare liaisons and nurse case managers, officials say.

The bilingual liaisons will ride with patients to South Korean hospitals and guide them through administrative details, while the case managers will check on patients to ensure they are being treated in accordance with U.S. expectations of medical care.

"They’ll serve as the conduit between the Korean hospital and the patient, and essentially be there to help navigate the health care system," said Haleh Rollerson, Tricare health care chief for the 65th Medical Brigade.

The brigade is hiring five liaisons and five case managers and hopes to have them working with patients within the next several days, Rollerson said. One of each will work out of camps Casey, Humphreys and Walker; two of each will work from Yongsan Garrison.

Both brigade commander Col. Jeffrey Clark and Col. Ronald Smith, commander of the Brian Allgood Army Community Hospital, served previously in Germany and agreed to modeling the new program after Tricare Germany’s liaison programs, Rollerson said.

A similar program is in place in Japan. U.S. Naval Hospital Yokosuka employs a case manager and Japanese doctor interns to help patients who use Japanese hospitals, Yokosuka officials said.

Most liaisons have worked in the medical profession as nurses, physical therapists or physicians’ assistants. More importantly, the liaisons speak both languages well and can intervene when the doctors have trouble communicating.

South Korea currently has beneficiary counselors and translators to help patients make appointments at one of the 19 partner hospitals that base patients visit when necessary. A list of hospitals is available on the revamped 65th Medical Brigade Web site at www.korea.amedd.army.mil.

The added staff will help clear up the differences found in South Korean health care. For example, South Korean doctors tend to prescribe fewer narcotics for pain management, Rollerson said.

The nurse’s role also can vary.

"A lot of the duties that we would expect nurses to do on the site can be a family’s responsibility here, such as bathing, changing bed linens and getting the patient up and walking them around," Rollerson said.

However, many servicemembers in South Korea are unaccompanied or otherwise don’t have family members that can attend to them. In such cases, the hospitals have been very receptive to foreign patient needs, Rollerson said.

The added liaisons and case managers also will help with any added caseload the medical brigade experiences as U.S. Forces Korea adds more command-sponsored tours for servicemembers with families.

"Basically, this will assist us with not just the current operations but with the projected growth that we’re going to see with tour normalization in Korea," said Lt. Col. Paul Roberts, deputy commander for Brian Allgood Community Hospital at Yongsan Garrison.