Dedicate time to teaching difficult cases
Outpatient education clinic improves compliance
When the teaching for a diagnosis or treatment method is complicated, providers don’t always have enough time to teach during a clinic visit. That’s why the University of Tennessee Family Practice Clinic in Memphis created a patient education clinic.
"It is set up to teach patients who present to the providers real teaching challenges — for instance, people who have chronic diseases with a lot of medications who keep taking their medications wrong in spite of everything the provider has done," says Carolyn Speros, MEd, MSN, RNC, nurse practitioner at the clinic.
The clinic is open one morning a week and is staffed by Speros and a pharmacist. When physicians refer patients to the clinic, they are usually scheduled for a 15- to 30-minute teaching session. Most of the patient referrals have a chronic disease such as diabetes or asthma. Many are on multiple medications and need to learn how to adhere to the complex regimen.
Before opening the clinic, Speros educated the providers on which patients were appropriate referrals. "We didn’t want physicians using the education clinic as a dumping ground for people they didn’t have time to teach. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to work with the people who really were in need of a lot of teaching," she says.
To cover the cost of the teaching, the sessions are billed as a clinic visit to a nurse practitioner for asthma and other conditions. In this way, insurance companies reimburse the clinic for the visit. "If the visit were billed for patient education, we wouldn’t be reimbursed," explains Speros.
Sources
For more information on creating a patient education clinic in an outpatient setting, contact:
• Carolyn Speros, MEd, MSN, RNC, Nurse Practitioner, University of Tennessee Family Practice Clinic, 1301 Primacy Parkway, Memphis, TN 38119. Telephone: (901) 685-1080, ext. 294. Fax: (901) 763-3649. E-mail: [email protected].
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