Ambulatory Care Services Goes "Lean"

Ordering tests and sharing results will get a whole lot easier

Soon, new systems will be in place that offer providers a way to share test results with support staff and other providers electronically—with just a few clicks of the mouse. In addition, standard requisition forms and labels will significantly reduce the chance of misdirection.

These are just some of the improvements providers will see and patients will benefit from with Ambulatory Care Services’ launch of the Internal Results Delivery Project, the first of four efforts to address clinical document delivery.

This effort is part of a wider ACS Clinical Document Delivery Program, a Michigan Quality System “lean” initiative designed to improve existing processes for broader clinical document delivery within the Health System (including test results, referring physician letters and discharge summaries to internal providers and external referring physicians).

In January 2006, physicians and staff from various UMHS clinics, along with the departments of Radiology, Pathology and Medical Center Information Technology, attended a three-day lean workshop to examine cross-departmental processing problems and identify solutions to improve delivery of outpatient results to the correct ordering provider.

“Our long-term goal is to deliver clinical documents to internal providers and external referring physicians electronically,” says Matt Plachta, director, ACS Business & Operations Support Services. “In addition to the patient care benefit of real-time electronic delivery, the Health System will realize a significant reduction in operating costs by eliminating printing and delivery of paper documents.”

The following results-reporting improvements are scheduled for implementation this year:

• CareWeb Results Inbox Enhancements
  To improve communication between providers, staff and patients, and reduce operating costs associated with paper results delivery and handling, MCIT is programming additional functionality into the existing CareWeb Results Inbox electronic medical record system module. This new functionality will allow clinicians to forward results to other clinicians for review and add a brief instruction to staff and/or the patient on the printed result, as well as forward misdirected test results to Health Information Management (formerly Medical Information Systems) for routing to the correct ordering provider.
  
  
• Standard Requisition Template
  To simplify requisition processing for ordering providers and improve consistent inclusion of key information, a new standard requisition template for ordering outpatient tests will be introduced. More than 100 existing requisition forms will be converted to feature a standard header.
  
  
• Labels
  To improve test results delivery to the correct internal providers, requisition labels that include key patient and provider information will be printed in all clinics.

For more information, visit the Internal Results Delivery Project Web site (authentication required). Learn more about the Michigan Quality System.