1. Access to care: improving access to team-based care
- Date: Thursday, September 19, 2019
- Concurrent Session B
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Time: 3:30pm-4:15pm
- Room: Harbour A & B
- Style: Presentation (information provided to audience, with opportunity for audience to ask question)
- Focus: Practical (e.g. Presentation on how to implement programs and/or practices in the team environment)
- Target Audience: Leadership (ED, clinical lead, board chair, board member, etc.), Clinical providers, Administrative staff
Learning Objectives
- Foster an understanding of the importance & value in providing a systematic mechanism for secure patient e-communications with their providers
- Identify both barriers and enablers to facilitate patient uptake of e-communication services
- Learn how to conduct a behavioural insights campaign to facilitate greater patient adoption of e-communication
Summary/Abstract
Connecting patients to their providers in a timely manner (when they need & want to connect) has consistently proven to be one of the greatest challenges in enabling better patient centred primary care. Who hasn't heard at least once before from their patients that they can't get through on the phone lines? The current climate of health system transformation has placed a significant emphasis upon enabling patient access through virtual care as a key component of an integrated and efficient health system. Organizations such as Kaiser Permanente have served as the benchmark with 54% of patient encounters conducted virtually. Following several months of planning, in September of 2018 SETFHT went live with the secure HealthMySelf (HMS) patient e-communication platform. However, despite having approximately 12,000 patient email addresses from our 20,000+ patients; wide spread adoption of this new service was becoming stagnant over a 5 month period reaching saturation at around 4500 patients signing up for the HMS portal by January 2019. In working with subject matter experts at the Treasury Board Secretariat Behavioural Insights Unit (TBS BIU) we mapped both patient and provider journey's in registering for this new service to reduce perceived obstacles with the objective of increasing uptake in patient HMS registration. Through these meetings, the BIU team made a series of recommendations to mitigate these corresponding barriers.
Presenter
- Stephen Beckwith, Clinical Practice Manager, South East Toronto Family Health Team