What is Nurse First?
Nurse First is a disease management program serving Montana Medicaid and Healthy Montana Kids clients. Nurse First empowers patients to become more active in their health care and provides assistance to providers in managing their care. The goal is to improve patient health status, assure access to quality care, and reduce avoidable visits and admissions. Nurse First consists of a nurse advice line, disease management and the Team Care Program.

Nurse First Advice Line. The advice line at 1-800-330-7847 is a 24x7, toll free and confidential nurse triage line staffed by licensed-registered nurses. Eligible patients are encouraged to call when symptomatic, before making appointments or visiting an urgent care or emergency room. The nurses assess the symptoms, then provide a care recommendation to seek services at the appropriate time and level of intervention. Nurses do not diagnose nor provide treatment. The service is voluntary though strongly encouraged.

Benefits to providers:

  • Decreases evening/weekend on-call traffic
  • Reduces no show rates
  • Allows providers to focus on higher acuity patients
  • Safely reduces avoidable healthcare utilization
  • Less PHONE traffic

Montana Health and Wellness Information. The Montana Health and Wellness Information website contains a knowledgebase on thousands of health topics including health conditions and diseases, medical tests and medications. A symptom checker uses a body template to help you associate symptoms with detailed information on health conditions. In addition, an audio library is available to listen to information on many of the website’s health topics.