Coordinated Care in Higher Education
Key Takeaways
Coordinated care is a student success operating model
It aligns people, processes, technology, and data so campus teams can work together around shared student needs.
Students need support across units
Academic, financial, personal, career, and belonging-related barriers rarely fit neatly into one office.
Care units create structure
Coordinated care works best when teams have defined roles, shared workflows, role-based visibility, and clear ownership.
The model is built around action, not just insight
Signals from students and staff only matter when they lead to timely outreach, clear ownership, and follow-through that helps resolve the student’s need.
Data enables continuous improvement
A Coordinated Care Network generates insight into student needs, staff activity, intervention follow-through, and outcomes, so that student support strengthens over time.
AI can extend (not replace) human support
AI and automation can help monitor student signals, reduce administrative burden, and free staff to focus on students with the most complex needs.
Early alert systems are a common starting point for proactive student support in higher education. When used well, they help institutions identify students who may need extra support before challenges become crises. But alerts without coordinated action can quickly become noise. When institutions lack a clear, cross-campus workflow for responding to alerts, faculty and staff can become overwhelmed by unmanaged alert volume, students may receive inconsistent support across departments, and valuable time is spent identifying needs without resolving them.
This page walks through what it takes to move beyond disconnected point solutions and offices to build a Coordinated Care Network: a campus-wide model that connects advisors, faculty, staff, data, and technology around shared student needs, clear ownership, and measurable outcomes.
What is Coordinated Care in Higher Education?
Coordinated care is a campus-wide approach to student support that helps colleges and universities identify student needs earlier, connect students to the right resources faster, and make sure someone follows through.
It combines:
- Signals that indicate a student may need help
- Workflows that route the student to the right person or team
- Case management that documents ownership, next steps, and status
- Communication that helps students act on support
- Analytics that track student outcomes, what is working, and where students are still falling through the cracks
Borrowed from the logic of coordinated healthcare, a Coordinated Care Network helps students move across offices without having to restart their story, repeat context, or figure out the next step alone. Admissions, advisors, faculty, financial aid, tutoring, career services, residence life, student affairs, wellness teams, and other support units work from shared information, clear workflows, and defined ownership. When a student raises their hand, or when the institution detects that a student may need help, the care network can act.
What is a Coordinated Care Network?
A Coordinated Care Network is the cross-campus structure that makes coordinated care possible. Coordinated care shifts student support from an advising-only responsibility to a shared institutional commitment. Faculty, coaches, advisors, financial aid staff, student affairs teams, and other frontline staff do not need to solve every student problem themselves—but they do need a clear way to connect students to the people who can.
A coordinated care model reduces friction on the journey between “I might need help” and “I got connected to the right support.” It does this by bringing together multiple datapoints available in the student journey and connecting the staff and offices that should be tracking these. Data points may include:
- Faculty alerts and progress reports
- Student self-referrals and hand raises
- Quick polls and surveys
- Registration and enrollment data
- Financial aid and hold data
- LMS activity and engagement signals
- Advising notes and appointment history
- Campaign responses and two-way outreach
- AI-supported signal detection and routing
A Coordinated Care Network connects four major parts of the student success ecosystem:
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Enrollment, transition, advising, and faculty support
Enrollment counselors, advisors, and faculty are often the first people to notice academic difficulty, disengagement, uncertainty, or concern. Coordinated care gives them a reliable way to flag issues, document context, and connect students to the right next step.
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Campus services and specialized support
Admissions, financial aid, tutoring, career services, residence life, student wellness, accessibility services, basic needs support, athletics, and other offices all play critical roles. Coordinated care helps those teams receive referrals with context, communicate consistently, and update the network once support has been given.
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Student self-guidance tools
Students increasingly use apps, portals, surveys, AI chat tools, guided to-do lists, and other self-service resources. These tools are most valuable when they are connected to the broader care network, rather than standing alone. When students share information through a survey or self-guided tool, staff should be able to use that information to personalize support.
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Data and technology infrastructure that keeps the network connected
Technology gives coordinated care the infrastructure to work at scale. By connecting student signals, outreach, appointments, referrals, notes, and outcomes, institutions can coordinate support in real time and use data to identify gaps in the student experience.
Coordinated Care vs. Traditional Student Support
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Traditional student support
- Students must identify the right office on their own
- Offices operate in siloes
- Faculty and staff may raise concerns informally
- Students repeat their story across offices
- Support is mostly reactive
- Follow-up depends on individual effort
- Leaders see outcomes after the fact
- Technology is fragmented across point solutions
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Coordinated care model
- Students are routed to the right support through shared workflows
- Teams work through a connected care network
- Alerts, referrals, cases, notes, and campaigns create trackable aciton
- Staff have role-based visibility into relevant context
- Support is proactive, triggered, and timed to key student moments
- Case management and workflows help close the loop
- Leaders can monitor activity, trends, and intervention effectiveness in real time
- Student support activity is coordinated through a shared CRM
Why Coordinated Care Matters Now
Most student success infrastructure was built for a student profile that does not match today’s reality: a student with relatively predictable needs, a linear path to completion, and enough time, confidence, and institutional knowledge to seek support independently.
Today’s students are navigating more complex paths. Many students face academic readiness gaps, financial pressure, work and family responsibilities, mental health concerns, questions of belonging, and uncertainty about the value and career payoff of college. These factors often compound. A student struggling in class may also be working long hours, missing financial aid paperwork, unsure of their major, or dealing with basic needs insecurity.
At the same time, faculty and staff are stretched thin. Advisors manage large caseloads. Faculty balance teaching, advising, and student wellbeing concerns. Student support teams often work across disconnected systems, manual processes, and department-specific workarounds.
The result is a familiar but costly pattern:
- Staff cannot see the full student picture
- Students are bounced between offices
- Faculty raise concerns but do not know what happened next
- Advisors spend time on manual tracking instead of high-value support
- Leaders cannot easily measure which interventions are working
- Successful practices in one unit do not scale campus-wide
Coordinated care addresses this pattern by creating a common operating system for student support.
Why Student Self Service is Not Enough: The Case for Proactive Advising
Many institutions have strong support resources. The problem is that students often do not use them when they need them most.
Seeking out help is a multi-step behavior: students must recognize they have a problem, decide they are willing to ask for help, choose the right resource, contact the person or office that provides that resource, obtain support, and then act on the guidance they receive. Any one of those steps can break down.
That is why proactive advising and coordinated care are not simply about making more resources available. They are also about making support easier to find, easier to act on, and easier to complete.
Turning Student Signals into Coordinated Action
Early alert systems in higher education are a starting point but a Coordinated Care Network is only valuable if it changes what happens next. The goal is not simply to collect more data about students; it is to turn the right signals into timely, coordinated support. That requires a repeatable process for identifying student needs, routing them to the right owner, following through, and learning from the results.
Capture student signals from multiple sources
Coordinated care starts by broadening the ways institutions learn that a student may need help. Signals can come from students, faculty, staff, systems, or predictive analytics.
Examples include:
- A student indicates in a quick poll that they need help with food, housing, transportation, financial aid, wellness, tutoring, disability resources, or career exploration.
- A faculty member submits a progress report about missing assignments, attendance concerns, or academic performance.
- A registration report shows that a student is eligible but has not planned or registered for the next term.
- A hold, unpaid balance, or missing FAFSA item creates a risk to enrollment.
- A student stops engaging with advising outreach or misses an appointment.
The more ways students can be seen, the less the institution depends on students to self-advocate at exactly the right moment.
Route support to the right owner
A signal should not land in a general inbox where no one knows who owns it. Coordinated care requires clear assignment.
The right owner may be an academic advisor, financial aid counselor, tutoring coordinator, student wellness team, residence life staff member, career advisor, coach, peer advisor, or dedicated student support specialist. The specific office matters less than the clarity of ownership.
Strong routing depends on care units, referral pathways, case rules, role-based access, and shared expectations for follow-up.
Close the loop with students and staff
The handoff is not complete when the referral is made. The institution needs to know whether the student received the message, scheduled the appointment, attended the meeting, declined support, or needs additional follow-up.
Closing the loop may include:
- Sending the student resource information and a direct appointment link
- Adding the student to a campaign or messaging sequence
- Assigning a case to a support specialist or referral partner
- Documenting notes and outcomes
- Notifying the original referral source when the connection is complete
- Closing the case with a reason code or next-step status
This is what distinguishes coordinated care from a one-time referral.
Use data to improve the system
Every coordinated care interaction creates data: what students need, who responded, which offices were involved, how long follow-up took, whether students completed appointments, and which barriers show up repeatedly.
Institutions can use that data to:
- Identify recurring friction points
- Improve referral pathways
- Allocate staff time based on student need
- Measure campaign and intervention effectiveness
- Understand which populations need targeted support
- Shift from retrospective reporting to real-time retention strategy
These steps can happen at any point in the student experience, but they are most powerful when they are embedded into the moments when students are most likely to need support. From onboarding to registration, coordinated care helps institutions move from one-off interventions to a full-lifecycle support strategy..
What Coordinated Care Looks Like Across the Student Journey
Coordinated care should not be limited to one alert campaign or one advising process. The model works best when it is embedded across key moments in the student lifecycle.
Pre-enrollment and onboarding
Coordinated care can help institutions identify new students who miss onboarding tasks, have unresolved questions, or show signs of melt.
Early term support
Quick polls and check-ins can ask students whether they need help with academics, finances, basic needs, wellness, or other support areas — then automated workflows can route alerts, open cases, and trigger outreach to the right office.
Academic progress and midterm intervention
Faculty-initiated alerts help institutions identify academic concerns before students fall further off track. A coordinated care model turns those reports into consistent structured follow-up.
Registration and persistence
Students who are eligible but not registered may be facing academic, financial, personal, administrative, or belonging-related barriers. A coordinated approach uses data to identify unregistered students, prioritize outreach, and determine who is most likely to get a response from each student.
Financial aid and basic needs
Financial and basic needs barriers often come up indirectly. A student may not register because of a cashier’s hold. They may miss class because of transportation. They may struggle academically because they are working more hours or facing food insecurity.
Coordinated care helps teams connect those dots. A financial aid conversation can surface basic needs. A quick poll can trigger a referral to a student resource center. A registration report can identify high-performing students who want to return but are blocked by financial paperwork.
Career readiness and long-term success
Career support is also part of coordinated care. Students need help connecting their academic path to their future, often earlier than institutions expect. A coordinated care model can embed career services into advising, student-athlete support, academic recovery, and first-year experience workflows.
Common Barriers to Coordinated Care
Most institutions recognize these barriers because they are already living with them. The practical question is where to start. Building a Coordinated Care Network does not require solving every student support challenge at once; it requires choosing a high-impact student moment, clarifying who needs to be involved, and creating a workflow that can be measured and improved.
Guide for Practitioners: How to Operationalize a Coordinated Care Network
Use the following steps as a practical starting point for moving coordinated care from concept to campus practice. The goal is to build a model that is specific enough to create accountability, but flexible enough to expand across teams, student populations, and support needs over time.
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Start with a student moment, not a technology feature
Choose a specific barrier or moment where coordination breaks down. Common proactive advising starting points include early academic difficulty, financial aid completion, basic needs, registration, stop-out prevention, tutoring utilization, and career readiness.
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Identify the units that touch that moment
Prioritize teams that serve the same students, require sequenced coordination, or benefit from shared visibility and clear ownership.
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Define the signal
Clarify what will trigger action. The signal might be a survey response, progress report, missing registration, hold, aid gap, appointment no-show, LMS activity, or staff referral.
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Assign ownership
Determine who receives the alert, referral, or case, who contacts the student, who owns follow-up, and who closes the loop.
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Standardize the workflow
Create repeatable steps, naming conventions, permissions, notes, case statuses, closure reasons, and reporting expectations.
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Make it easy for students to act
Do not send students vague resource lists and hope they follow through. Provide direct links, clear next steps, appointment scheduling, reminders, and outreach from someone who can help.
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Train faculty and staff
Coordinated care is a culture shift. Training should help faculty and staff understand how to recognize concerns, issue referrals, talk with students, use the technology, and trust that someone will follow up.
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Measure and iterate
Review response rates, completed appointments, case volume, time to follow-up, referral outcomes, student satisfaction, persistence, retention, and patterns by population or unit. Use the data to improve the process.
Even the best coordinated care strategy will struggle if the work still depends on disconnected systems, spreadsheets, inboxes, and informal handoffs. Technology is not the strategy by itself, but it provides the backbone that helps institutions make coordinated care visible, repeatable, and scalable.
How a Student Success CRM Supports Coordinated Care
A student success CRM should do more than store student information or help one office manage outreach. For coordinated care to work at scale, the platform has to become the shared operating system for student support, connecting people, workflows, data, and student actions.
Institutions should look for a student success CRM that can:
- Create one trusted, shared view of each student, bringing together academic progress, risk indicators, alerts, referrals, notes, appointments, outreach, engagement history, and support activity across campus
- Move beyond passive reporting by turning student signals into coordinated action through automated workflows, case management, assigned ownership, reminders, campaigns, and closed-loop follow-up
- Connect the full care network—not just advising—including faculty, financial aid, tutoring, residence life, career services, accessibility, athletics, student affairs, and other support units in one coordinated infrastructure
- Make it easy for students to act in the moment through mobile access, direct outreach, appointment scheduling, personalized to-dos, hand raise, nudges, resources, and two-way communication
- Give leaders visibility into what happened after a student was flagged: who followed up, how the student responded, which services were used, and which interventions are contributing to persistence, retention, and completion
- Pair technology with student success expertise, implementation support, and proven practices so the system becomes part of campus culture—not another underused point solution
The right CRM is not simply the one that can check the most feature boxes. It is the one that can unify fragmented teams, scale proactive support, engage students directly, and show measurable impact. That is the difference between a CRM that records student success work and a coordinated care platform that helps institutions deliver it.
Navigate360 is EAB’s student CRM for helping institutions recruit, retain, and empower students across the student journey. With Navigate360, colleges and universities can:
- Consolidate student profiles, staff notes, alerts, referrals, appointments, and outreach into a shared system
- Enable automated, AI-driven workflows to reduce staff burden and route students to support more quickly
- Coordinate advising, faculty, financial aid, tutoring, residence life, career services, and other care units
- Launch campaigns and two-way outreach that prompt students to take action
- Automate reminders, to-dos, and next steps
- Use quick polls and surveys to identify student needs in real time
- Track whether students completed appointments, responded to outreach, or declined support
- Report on trends, intervention effectiveness, and outcomes
Navigate360 supports coordinated care by helping institutions reduce fragmented point solutions, connect offices across campus, and close the gap between student insight and coordinated action.
Where AI fits in coordinated care
AI can make coordinated care more scalable, but only when it is embedded in a strong human support model, working with and for staff and students:
- AI assistants can help staff draft communications, summarize student profiles, prepare for meetings, create course plans, filter data, and launch campaigns.
- Student-facing AI support can help students get answers, manage to-dos, schedule appointments, and connect with staff.
- AI-enabled networks can monitor risk signals, prompt alerts, create tasks, launch campaigns, and route students to the right support.
This matters because staff time should be allocated based on student need. Some students need high-touch, human support. Others need timely reminders, self-guided support, active monitoring, or a quick connection to the right resource.
Ready to Turn Student Signals into Coordinated Action?
Students should not have to navigate institutional complexity alone. With the right people, processes, technology, and data, colleges and universities can build a Coordinated Care Network that helps students get the support they need, when they need it.
Navigate360 helps institutions make coordinated care actionable at scale—connecting advisors, faculty, staff, students, and support units through shared workflows, proactive outreach, case management, analytics, and AI-enabled support.
Coordinated Care FAQs
Learn More
What are early alert systems in higher education?
Early alert systems in higher education are tools and processes that help institutions identify students who may need support before challenges become barriers. They typically include faculty progress reports, student self-referrals, survey responses, and data signals. In a coordinated care model, early alert systems are one of the primary ways institutions capture student signals and route them to the right support.
What does coordinated care mean in higher education?
Coordinated care means aligning campus teams, student data, workflows, and technology so students receive timely support from the right person or office. It helps institutions move from disconnected, reactive support to proactive, trackable student success action.
What is a Coordinated Care Network?
A Coordinated Care Network is the cross-campus system of advisors, faculty, staff, care units, workflows, student-facing tools, and technology that identifies student needs, routes support, closes the loop, and measures outcomes.
How is coordinated care different from advising?
Advising is one essential part of coordinated care, but coordinated care extends beyond advising. It includes faculty, financial aid, tutoring, career services, residence life, wellness, basic needs, accessibility services, student affairs, and other support teams.
What is a care unit?
A care unit is a defined support team or service area within a coordinated care model. Care units help institutions manage permissions, referrals, workflows, notes, campaigns, appointments, and reporting for specific support functions such as tutoring, financial aid, career services, or residence life.
Why does coordinated care improve student success?
Coordinated care helps institutions identify barriers earlier, reduce student friction, assign clear ownership, support follow-through, and learn from intervention data. That can improve help-seeking, persistence, retention, and the overall student experience.
What role does AI play in coordinated care?
AI can help monitor risk signals, automate routine reminders, draft communications, summarize student context, support student self-service, and route students to help. The strongest use of AI strengthens human support rather than replacing it.
What should I look for in a technology to support coordinated care?
When evaluating technology to support coordinated care, ask whether it can:
- Serve as a shared student success CRM, not another disconnected point solution
- Support role-based access and privacy-sensitive collaboration
- Capture alerts, referrals, notes, appointments, campaigns, tasks, and cases
- Route students to the right care unit or support owner
- Support two-way email and text outreach
- Make scheduling easy for students and staff
- Integrate with SIS, LMS, analytics, and other core systems
- Use surveys and quick polls to identify student needs
- Support reporting at the student, course, population, unit, and institutional levels
- Automate routine workflows without removing human judgment
- Provide AI assistance for staff efficiency and student support
- Help leaders measure impact and continuously improve
The right technology should make coordinated care easier for staff and clearer for students.
Build Your Coordinated Care Network with Navigate360
To see what a Coordinated Care Network could look like on your campus, fill out the form to request a customized demo of Navigate360.