Improving health outcomes and reducing the nation’s health budget attributed to chronic illnesses (currently 70 percent) is a major issue for patients, medicine, and the economy. Efforts by experts in health policy and clinical medicine have focused on organizational factors, e.g., team-based approaches, for improving chronic illness management by patients and families. The current symposium focuses on improving chronic illness management by translating models of the processes underlying patient’s self-management of chronic illness (Common-Sense Models of everyday behavior) to clinical practice and embedding these models in current approaches to management. These models describe how patients represent (perceive and understand) chronic conditions, their treatments, the action plans they create to implement disease management in their home environments, and how they evaluate treatment efficacy. We describe how patient’s representations of asthma, hypertension, and diabetes affect adherence to prescribed treatments, and how their perceptions affect the use of medical care for life-threatening myocardial infarctions and chronic deterioration from congestive heart failure. Preliminary evidence is presented on the benefits of implementing these models in clinical practice, and we describe how recent evidence from cognitive neuroscience complements and supports a framework for modeling the everyday behaviors involved in the common-sense management of chronic illness.