UCSF Center for Healthcare Value - Caring Wisely 2.0

Crowd-sourcing innovative cost savings ideas from the front lines of care delivery systems

Improving Outpatient Laboratory Patient Flow

Idea Status: 

In the outpatient laboratory at Parnassus I have personally witnessed that at 7 AM there are numerous phlebotomists in the lab sitting around unable to draw labs because there is only 1 person available at that hour to do registrations. Many patients are fasting for labs and must register so they are in the Apex system to get their labs drawn. This is an inefficiency of the phlebotomists and is certainly not user friendly as there is a long line of patients waiting to get registered to get labs. A better system would be to have many more registration folks available, or work out a system to pre-register folks before they come to the lab to get their labs drawn.

Comments

Epic has an application called "Welcome" which is similar to the self-check-in kiosks at airports.  Perhaps one or two of these kiosks that would allow patients to fill in some of the pre-reg info while they're waiting might help speed things along.  Or maybe if some of the forms could be published to MyChart and they could be handed a tablet with MyChart to start filling in some of the info in MyChart while they wait.

Commenting is closed.