Increase in the Patient Show Rate at the HIV Positive Health Care Clinic

Summary

Impact Statement: 
This health department found the root cause of the high HIV clinic “no show” to be out of date patient contact information. They developed a simple and timely patient contact update process that dropped the “no show” rate dramatically in 8 weeks.
Summary: 

The City of Portland Public Health Division is located in Portland, Maine, and serves a unique mix of urban and rural populations, providing services to the whole of Cumberland County, at about 279,000 residents. Using the Public Health Accreditation Board Self-Assessment and a quality improvement (QI) project, the City of Portland Public Health Division streamlined filing of patient update forms at the India Street Clinic for HIV Positive Health Care patients. This project was chosen due to low patient show rates and difficulty contacting patients as a result of outdated contact information in their records. As a result, the no-show rate decreased by 45% two months post-implementation of the improvement intervention.

Organization that conducted the QI initiative: 
City of Portland Public Health Division
Citation: 

Soma, T. Public Health Quality Improvement Exchange. Increase in the Patient Show Rate at the HIV Positive Health Care Clinic. Thu, 11/16/2017 - 15:29. Available at http://phqix.org/content/increase-patient-show-rate-hiv-positive-health-care-clinic. Accessed March 28, 2024.

Submission Status: 
Completed
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Comments

Submitted by margyrob on

Great to see that your health department has used the PHAB process for identifying quality improvement projects! I am curious about your process. Did you identify several projects as a part of getting ready for accreditation and then prioritize?

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Margy Robinson MPH
HIV Care Services Mgr.
Multnomah County Health Dept.
Portland, OR

Submitted by tohosoma on

Yes we did. I think we had 5 projects we were considering and then we used a prioritization matrix to select this QI project. Would you like to see that matrix?

-Toho

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Submitted by cvotta on

It is amazing what a simple small change can do with an outcome.

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