“We were able to reduce the number of phone calls going back and forth between our facility and individual cardiologist offices by 4,000 in the past year,” she said. Newport also said the cath lab has been able to track a significant reduction in the amount of time spent on coordinating patient follow-up appointments. “Before PerfectServe, getting a follow-up appointment scheduled could take all day, and often the patients would simply leave without an appointment.” “So far, we have not had an instance where we were not able to get a follow-up appointment scheduled within 30 minutes,” Newport said. They also initiated an automatic escalation process so that if the appointment request was not executed within 30 minutes, a higher-level supervisor is notified and can step in to get the appointment scheduled.
#Follow up appointment series
Now, instead of conducting a series of calls that could take several hours to complete, medical assistants at the cath lab use PerfectServe to get appointment request details to the person available at that time to schedule the appointment. Used in more than 165 hospital systems like UTMC, PerfectServe is a secure clinical communications platform that expedites patient care by reducing call cycle times and promoting real-time collaboration between the extended care team. The University of Tennessee Catheterization Laboratory and Cardiovascular Recovery Unit began using PerfectServe to coordinate the scheduling of follow-up appointments for discharge patients. And having a readmission within 30 days of the procedure is going to have a financial impact on the hospital.” “If there’s a circumstance that goes unnoticed or untreated because the patient didn’t come in for the follow-up, it could lead to a readmission. “When patients miss follow-up appointments, it creates a potential financial impact for the hospital,” Newport said. When patients get tired of waiting for their follow-up appointment to be scheduled, they leave and the chances of them scheduling the follow-up appointment and showing up for it drop off rapidly. “At that point, it becomes a patient satisfaction issue as well,” Newport explained.
#Follow up appointment full
Sometimes a game of phone tag ensues, leaving hours - even full days - between the time the patient is ready to be discharged and the time when the follow-up appointment is scheduled.
The medical assistant then contacts the cardiologist’s office to schedule the appointment - almost always by leaving a voice message.
Nurses communicate with medical assistants in the cath lab to let them know which patients require a follow-up appointment, and with which cardiologist. Scheduling follow-up appointments in a cath lab setting involves communicating with a few disparate entities. The biggest key to getting early-on compliance from patients, though, is efficient and convenient scheduling of the follow-up appointment. The purpose of the cath lab follow-up appointment is to make sure that patients are complying with their medications, and to check the healing process of wounds and re-dress anything that may need attention.Īccording to Becky Newport, Nurse Manager at the Catheterization Laboratory and Cardiovascular Recovery Unit, University of Tennessee Medical Center (UTMC), “If we can get our patients to be compliant with their medications and wound care, then we’re in front of the complications and can hopefully prevent areadmission.”