First step: You have to contact your patients
Phone call reaches virtually 100% of patients
It’s a given: You have to be able to reach patients for postoperative telephone interviews in order to measure outcomes effectively.
At The Surgery Center of Columbia in Middleburg, OH, a revised post-op telephone interview process and form enabled the center to go from reaching 75% of patients by telephone after surgery to reaching virtually 100% of patients. (See revised form enclosed in this issue.)
The number of patients reached is monitored daily on an "internal measures board" that is posted in the hallway near the break area. The changes involving the postoperative telephone call included:
• informing patients they would receive a post-op call;
• designing a specific format for the post-op call sheet;
• verifying phone numbers with patients and families, including numbers of where patients would be recuperating.
"If they indicate they plan on going to work, we ask their permission to call at work," says Nancy King, RN, CAPA, TQM coordinator at the center, who recently spoke at the annual Same-Day Surgery Conference, sponsored by Same-Day Surgery newsletter, in Washington, DC.
Patients are asked whether they have an answering machine, and, if so, they are asked whether the center can leave a message.
"We always ask the patient’s permission to either leave a message on a recorder or call them at work, as their surgery may be a confidential issue," King says. "If we have permission to leave a message on a recorder, we stress that it’s important for them to call us back, even if they are fine."
The form includes a space for individual details about patients, such as whether they go home with a catheter or drain, so that nurses can follow up to ensure they aren’t experiencing any complications with those items.
The center has used this form to generate studies of, for example, patients who were admitted to a hospital within 48 hours of being discharged from the center.
Information from the post-op telephone interview is tracked and shared for benchmarking purposes with other facilities that are part of Nashville, TN-based Columbia HCA Healthcare Corp. In addition, the information has been shared with payers.
"The outcome of this is a good example of value improvement," King says. "We were able to meet our customers’ needs and remove unnecessary costs time wasted looking up phone numbers and repeating phone calls."
You have reached your article limit for the month. Subscribe now to access this article plus other member-only content.
- Award-winning Medical Content
- Latest Advances & Development in Medicine
- Unbiased Content