Poster 574 Advocating for a Patient's Quality of Life: A Case Report

Abstract

time (A), the time the secretary pages patient technician (B), the time the technician rooms a patient (C), the time the technician notifies a resident (D), the time the resident spent reviewing the chart (E), the time the resident sees a patient (F), the time the resident presents to attending (G), the time resident and attending review patient together (H), the time resident finishes documentation (I) and the time patient checks out (J). Setting: Teaching clinic at tertiary care hospital residency program. Participants: SCI patients seen over a five month period in 2013. Interventions: N/A Main Outcome Measures: Definition of workflow and measurement of turnaround time.Results or Clinical Course: A total of 68 patients were seen in the clinic. Of those, thirty six patients had 9 out of 12 data points collected. The remaining three were missing. The average turnaround time of these patients was 104 minutes with 22% percent arriving 10 minutes after their scheduled appointment time. The average number of minutes to complete Steps A/B: 4.5, B/C: 8.7, C/ D: 1.7, E: 10.8, J: 6.4 and F/G/H/I 19.3 minutes per step. Conclusions: 104 minutes per visit was deemed too long. Literature shows a direct impact between a patient's wait time and their satisfaction. From this exercise we learned that there are gaps in efficiency in the areas of rooming patients, reviewing charts and actual clinicians' time. Perhaps, teaching time is partly responsible for the latter.