See our blog entry on Increasing Cancer Screening and Preventive Care Bonuses for a general background on this topic.
Ocean questionnaire invitations can work in harmony with PSS reminders to help your clinicians be more proactive in offering interventions for patients within your clinic. This feature is particularly useful for implementing population management initiatives such as cancer screening reminders and patient satisfaction surveys.
PSS Reminders are a powerful EMR feature that can provide automatic cues for patients who are due for certain interventions such as pap tests, mammograms, bone mineral density screening, and so on.
Ocean has a set of complementary preventive patient questionnaires for obtaining consent for these interventions. For example, there is a questionnaire in Ocean that explains the purpose of a bone mineral density test and asks the patient how they would like to go about arranging this test.
Using a PSS reminder in conjunction with an Ocean survey, you can create an automated directive that tells the clinician or receptionist when to give a patient a specific form. This directive will result in a streamlined workflow, allowing you to increase patient coverage both at the point of care (using reminder cues) and as a batch invitation (using reminder reports).
Step 1: Creating or Importing Reminders
The first task involves standardizing on a set of reminders for pap tests, mammograms etc. The Ocean Clinical Resource Library has a number of reminders that you can freely download to get started. Please check the PS Suite manual for more instructions on creating reminders.
For Ocean, you may find it useful to create a reminder that keys in on a custom vital.
Once you have your reminders in place, the PSS reminders box will display a cue whenever you are viewing a patient who is due for that intervention.
For example, you may see a cue that says, "due for mammogram". This cue can incite a nurse to give the patient a Mammogram Invitation questionnaire that explains the rationale and procedure for a mammogram and asks how they would like to schedule one.
Step 2: Running Reminder Reports
To take a more proactive approach, you can run these reminders as Reminder Reports in PSS using the Patient menu.
For each patient in the reminder report, you can use Ocean to send them a 'Mammogram Reminder' online questionnaire invitation using a customizable Ocean Online Questionnaire template.
Tip: You might want to check off the 'Notify Me When Complete' box so that you can immediately follow up on the patient's answers after you receive an email notification.
Step 3: Viewing Responses
Once a patient has completed the questionnaire, you can open their chart to view their response. Depending on the Ocean questionnaire, it should be clear what the patient wants to do (self-schedule a test, decline, etc) and your staff can proceed accordingly.
Step 4: Follow-up Reports
Depending on the Ocean questionnaire used, the patient's response will have some standard text like this:
@MammogramReminder: SentThis note is formatted as a custom vital for PSS. PSS can use custom vitals to segregate these patients when you run additional searches or reminder reports. For example, you can modify your reminder report to exclude patients who already have a "@MammogramReminder" in the chart. This option may be useful for repeat reminders.
To learn more about PSS custom vitals, please refer to "Using Custom Vitals to Track eForms or eForm Answers".
Step 5: Batch Reports
Ocean has a powerful feature that allows you to send online questionnaire invites to large patient groups. Using this feature, you can export all of the patients within a reminder report, upload their basic data to Ocean, and send a template invitation to all of them at once as a single action.
For more information on sending batch questionnaires to patient cohorts, see this article.