Southwest Virginia Community Health Systems, Inc. (SVCHS), in Meadowview, Va., wanted to improve their workflows to increase patient engagement. By taking a deeper look into their annual wellness visit (AWV) process and implementing tools to meet specific goals, they were able to revamp their systems and provide more preventive care without overwhelming their staff.
SVCHS set an initial goal to have 38% of their patient population complete preventive care visits in 2024, approximately an 11% increase from 2023. As 2024 concluded, it was clear their updated workflows were successful – SVCHS ended the year with a 71.27% increase in AWV visits over 2023 totals — smashing their original goal.
.jpg?width=350&height=501&name=Christie%20Hayton%20(1).jpg)
SVCHS Quality Director Christie Hayton
Focused on the 'why's'
SVCHS Quality Director Christie Hayton was working to optimize care workflows alongside the clinical team. She said it was clear staff were spending a lot of their time attempting to reach patients that either didn’t answer calls or would end up back on the contact list from no-show appointments.
“It seemed like a vicious cycle with not a lot of return,” she said.
With more health plans incentivizing quality outcomes, AWVs needed to become a priority. “This required a huge culture change within the organization. This wasn’t something we had been pushing,” Hayton said.
To address this, Hayton’s team explained to leadership why things needed to change. “We needed to focus on these visit types and the ‘why’s’ of why this would be beneficial for the organization — as well as the patient,” she said. “By doing wellness visits, it is better care for our patients, the visits have a higher reimbursement versus a regular office visit, and there is quality incentive money given for the completion of these visits.”
Leadership agreed. The next step was to develop an improvement and implementation plan.
Plan
SVCHS analyzed the workflows they were using daily and identified gaps. From that, they created a new plan that included:
- Automating patient outreach through a texting platform
- Scheduling preventive visits at each check-out
- Re-educating the staff on the importance of these new measures
- Meeting weekly to discuss what was working and what could be improved
However, this could only work if the entire care team bought in and executed these actions.
“We knew that providing incentives to the staff would help with the buy-in,” Hayton said.
To encourage staff to book more preventive visits, a monthly reward system was set in place that could flex to the desires of the care teams in each office when they met their goals. She said, “This in time, has been slowly creating buy-in from staff and they look forward to these monthly incentives.”
Do
The application of automated outreach freed up time and allowed the staff to shift focus to other needs. One position was designated specifically for pre-visit planning.
“We were a little leery if this position was going to work,” she said. “We tracked the data and saw this position was helping our no-show rate, and it reduced the burden on our nursing staff.“
Study
SVCHS issued surveys throughout the process to gather feedback.
“We felt early on that we needed to survey staff to get their input on certain aspects of this project. We needed to know if they were working or if it made it more cumbersome to the staff,” Hayton said.
Communication across all levels drove success as new processes were put in place.
Act
After assessing the data and tracking progress on the goals set, SVCHS was able to tweak their plan to continue to move the organization forward in providing the most effective, comprehensive care for their patients.
“It gave a chance to reflect back to see where we were and how far we have come in the process. We are constantly looking at how we can improve our services within SVCHS and better serve our community,” Hayton said.
The results
They surpassed their original 2024 goal of 4,800 preventive care visits by 1,600. From approximately 3,700 visits in 2023, to 6,400 in 2024, major strides were made in making sure more patients got the care they needed.
For other teams looking to make similar changes, Hayton had this advice: “First and foremost, completely understand the current situation and process,” she said. Beyond that, she said, goals should be a challenge, but not so far-fetched the effort is futile.
“When setting a goal, make sure that it is attainable and achievable,” Hayton said.”Be committed to see the project through, because if you don’t have buy-in to the project, you are less likely to get buy-in from others.”