Quality Improvement Lessons on Implementing Personal Health Records

Abstract

As part of a quality improvement exercise, our multispecialty organization decided to promote the use of personal health records to improve workflow efficiency and effectiveness. The organization was experiencing large volumes of patient phone calls for a wide variety of reasons, such as appointments, medication refills, phone consults, referral requests, and patient lab results, among others. The phone calls, in addition to all the front office duties, were creating long queues in the phone lines, leading to patient dissatisfaction, front office and clinical staff stress, and the need to hire more staff and acquire additional phone lines to address the backlog of phone calls. Patients also were requesting records (e.g., immunization records, lab results) that had to be printed and mailed. The net effect was an increase in overhead costs. The organization has always had an electronic portal to patient personal health records, but it was not heavily used as part of the organizational workflow. After studying the benefits of the portal and the personal health record, we felt that there was an opportunity to reduce the volume of phone calls and overtime for front office staff and, in the long term, even reduce staffing.