3. Investing in the digital health of primary care
- Date: 2024-10-25
- Concurrent Session: Concurrent Session F
- Time: 11:15 am- 12 pm
- Room:
- Style: Presentation (information provided to audience, with opportunity for audience to ask question)
- Focus: Practical (e.g. Presentation on how to implement programs and/or practices in the team environment)
- Target Audience: Leadership (ED, clinical lead, board chair, board member, etc.) Clinical providers, Administrative staff
Learning Objectives:
Participants will learn:
- Maximizing the scope of practice of nurses in an inter-disciplinary team
- Empowering patients and increasing patient experience
- Expanding the capabilities of digital tools
- Highlighting the importance and opportunity of health promotion and disease prevention
Summary/Abstract:
The Carefirst FHT is fortunate to have an outstanding team of nurses who focus their time on both clinical support and health promotion and disease prevention activities for our patients. The provision of health promotion and disease prevention counselling is often most effective when the patient is prepared and is scheduled at a time when they can focus. Although there are many patients identified where counselling or follow up would be beneficial for things like osteoporosis, BP follow up or cholesterol, cold calling patients is time consuming and inefficient. To trial a different approach, the Carefirst FHT decided to leverage a well established digital tool used by our physicians. Ocean Online Appointment Booking has been in use with our physicians for several years and continues to gain popularity with our patients. At the beginning of 2024 we started to investigate how this platform could be expanded to our nursing team to support several opportunities: 1. Focus the physician appointment on specific concerns and enable continued discussion on health promotion and disease prevention with the nursing team 2. Empower patients to book appointments at a time that is convenient for them to further discuss health promotion and disease prevention 3. Help decrease the number of nursing appointment no-shows as this tool enables automated patient reminders To enable these opportunities, a specific link for Online Appointment Booking with a nurse was developed. Two main activities will be initiated to encourage patients to book an appointment. The first is the creation of a business card with a QR code that physicians can hand out to patients to encourage these types of bookings. The second is leveraging our EMR to identify patients who would benefit from health promotion and disease prevention counselling as well as nutrition advice and send an email with the booking link to those patients. The criteria for the EMR search will be curated with a specific focus on at risk individuals. Our goals are to maximize the scope and expertise of nurses in an inter-disciplinary team, emphasize the importance of health promotion and disease prevention in a Family Health Team and improve the patient experience.
Presenter:
- Hilary Lau, Lead Nurse, Carefirst Family Health Team
- John Woo, Office Manager, Carefirst Family Health Team
- Tamara Belfer Executive Director, Carefirst Family Health Team
- Dr. Kinsey Lam Family Physician, Carefirst Family Health Team