Kristie Loescher, Ph.D., academic director of the Health Care Innovation Initiative, teaches a course called Healthcare System Management at the McCombs School of Business. In this course, and throughout a semester-long consulting project, students are introduced to the business ecosystem of the U.S. health care industry to investigate the business structures, processes and outcomes of health services in America.
The following post is authored Sharon Biju, Rebecca Jean Friday, Madeline Fynes, Vish Nair and Jordan Wright, University of Texas students who completed Loeschner’s course.
We set out to explore ways to improve the transfer of patient information at the Surgical Oncology Clinic at UT Health Austin in the fall of 2021. Our team collaborated with Declan Fleming, M.D., chief of the Division of Surgical Oncology in Dell Medical School’s Department of Surgery and Perioperative Care, and Diana Mendoza, a health professional specialist in the Surgical Oncology Clinic. They advised us as we explored how to make the referral process more efficient, organized and user-friendly.
Through a growing number of patient referrals, we learned that the time it takes for a referring provider’s office to send over medical documentation has spiked. We also learned that patient information files are sent as one large chunk of unorganized data in the clinic’s electronic medical records. This tedious process of digging through large files to find relevant information takes time away from providing patient care.
In our time working with the clinic, Fleming told us about a lack of communication that leads to extended delays in the services patients receive. These communication errors come from every level: sometimes from missing imaging or documentation, other times from redundant information. Regardless of the reason, the result is increased scheduling time and fragmented care for patients.
Our group formulated three ideas to improve the efficiency of the current referral process. Our first solution was to standardize the process of labeling and sorting documents in the clinic’s electronic medical records software from incoming faxes. This would produce labeled pages filed in the patient’s chart for easy and accessible reference. Our second recommendation was to use an updated feature in software called the “progress tracker,” which recognizes any missing documents, minimizes follow-up time and prevents file duplication.
Lastly, our most ambitious solution took the project a step further by proposing an undergraduate program. Much of the referral process requires time-consuming tasks that do not require much training or advanced education. With this insight in mind, we proposed a mutually beneficial undergraduate program for pre-med students seeking to intern or volunteer at the clinic. With this approach, clinical staff would be able to spend more time with patients, provide more efficient care and decrease costs due to any redundancies or lack of care coordination.