Improving Wait Time for Patients in a Pediatric Echocardiography Laboratory - a Quality Improvement Project.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Prolonged wait times for echocardiograms in the outpatient pediatric cardiology clinic led to patient and provider dissatisfaction at our institution. The aims of this project were to measure our baseline performance with regard to echocardiogram wait time (EWT), to implement a formal quality improvement (QI) program to improve EWT, and to measure the impact of QI on EWT.

Methods

A QI team was formed comprising of cardiologists (A.P., T.S.), sonographer (A.W.), and QI mentor (J.M.). EWT was defined as time in minutes from initiation of the order in the electronic medical record to start of the echocardiogram. Goal EWT was set as ≤ 20 minutes for 90% patients. Flowcharts were created after process observation to identify sources of potential delay contributing to E

SUBMITTER: Parthiban A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6132813 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May-Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature