Practice Transformation Enhances Community Care
Since fall of 2020, even as staff navigated the pandemic, All Care Health Center has been re-designing their processes to improve patient care experiences. With the help of proven clinical transformation programs and highly experienced coaches from Coleman Associates, out of Denver, Colorado, our patient care teams and leaders have received training, coaching, and inspiration intended to grow the existing talent of All Care Health Center and transform each of its clinics into patient-centric medical homes with consistent positive outcomes.
All Care’s patient care teams, administrative AND support staff have been encouraged to re-think patient care while implementing new techniques and programs. This practice transformation has followed months of leadership development, through Coleman’s online and on-demand accelerated learning modules, training, and coaching. The practical, tested solutions are producing dramatic results that are meeting big, audacious goals set by the All Care leadership team.
Team goals help to improve care team collaboration and dramatically enhance the patient experience resulting in increased patient satisfaction. These improvements include shorter wait times on the phone, and additional visit services to meet patient needs. All Care knows how busy its patients are and is working to decrease the amount of time patients spend in-clinic, while keeping provider time paramount. All Care is also actively working to reduce patient no-show rates to keep clinic schedules full. This practice, coupled with a new simplified patient scheduling, increases patient opportunity to schedule and receive care. All of this takes place while adopting practical solutions that reduce provider burnout.
Leading efforts to test solutions of Practice Transformation is the Dramatic Performance Improvement Team (DPI Team). This team plans and executes Rapid Redesign Testing to evaluate each piece of the new workflow. The team demonstrations the value of putting the work into planning before running a test to enhance the patient experience and increase staff satisfaction.
The DPI Team was hand-selected by All Care’s leadership team, with guidance from Coleman Associates, to steer the hard work leading to positive change. The team was built from representative across the All Care staff spectrum. The team includes Nancy Childe, advanced registered nurse practitioner (ARNP); Brenna King, registered nurse (RN); Angel Brown, medical assistant (MA); Viviana Ramirez, medical customer service representative; Wanda Zellmer, medical records clerk; and Mayra Loza, enrollment specialist. This team diligently works out kinks in the new processes before testing and rolling out to other Patient Care Teams. This team truly represents the heart of All Care’s practice transformation.
The practice transformation includes key tasks performed by all members of the patient care team, also known as The Team Dance or The All Care Way. The process starts with active visit preparation where care teams review patient information, days before the visit, to look for key information and document findings that ensure the entire team is prepared for a streamlined visit, upon patient arrival. Scrubbing the schedule helps to eliminate unnecessary appointments and allows future appointments to be raked forward. Following these processes, robust confirmation calls lead to an effective care team huddle, shepherded by the medical assistant. The first patient visit of the day begins smoothly with QuickStart and sets the stage for ongoing key team communication.
As the clinic day moves forward, both 2-minute calls and schedule “Jockeying” are executed by the front desk through continuous communication with the rest of the care team. The MA will red-carpet each patient, maximizing their innate skills and observations to make the patient feel welcome, comfortable, confident and well-prepared for their visit with their provider. This is a key piece for the MA who will relay this information to the provider through a 30-second report.
During the visit, the patient may notice a simple difference in their visit – a Midway Knock. This simple change in communication streamlines processes between the medical assistant and provider to continue smooth visits with each patient until the end-of-day care team cuddle, or debrief. A soft landing to the end of the day is the result of these carefully executed practices.
All Care’s practice transformation is benefitting patients, meeting health center goals, and aims to impact health outcomes of the entire community.