Hospitals look for ways to improve patient education all the time. Once in a while, this education pays dividends on multiple levels—such as the case of Parrish Medical Center in Boca Raton, FL.
Parrish Medical Center found that a significant portion of the hospital's patient population had Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD) and an education program led to downstream revenue of nearly $500,000 through repeat visits for follow-up care and unrelated tests.
The program's original intent was to raise community awareness, standardize treatment, document outcome measures, and increase communication for those providing care to PAD patients.
Nurse educator Marialice Knight, RN, BSN, started the program at Parrish. "In 2003 … I became aware of a study by Partners, which performed ankle-brachial indexes on close to 7,000 patients," says Knight. "They found that 29% were positive for peripheral disease. It was weird that less than half of their physicians were aware they had this."
Knight presented this study to two physicians in the cardiac rehabilitation department. They worked together to take a proposal to the facility's administration for a plan to educate the community about this disease and perform screenings.
"Our administration immediately embraced it—not just as a community effort, but as a way of identifying these patients who were out there and had no idea" they were at risk, says Knight.
The organization was able to purchase 20 machines and recruited physicians to place the screening devices in their offices.
"We realized we weren't getting the volumes we wanted so we initiated further programs," says Knight.
The organization hosted screenings every September during Cardiovascular Disease Awareness Month between 2005 and 2007.
In 2007, the effort kicked into overdrive, and Knight and her associates began gathering data on who they were screening and what their risk factors were in accordance with the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association guidelines.
"That's where we are today—since May 2007, we've done roughly 1,700 screenings," says Knight.
The program has evolved over time. The initial case study involved 883 patients, who heard about the study through advertisements calling for specific risk factors. Since the initial study, the program has been revised to target diabetics, smokers, hypertensives, people with high cholesterol, and people with vascular disease.
"As a result, our numbers [of screenings] are less, but we're targeting the people most at risk," says Knight.
Targeting the right people required the help of the communications office. "I've gone to the diabetes program, the pulmonary rehab center, the sleep lab, the heart failure group. I've invited their patients and have those clinicians send us those patients," says Knight. "It was so easy to have Kathie [Coon, communications specialist with Parrish] put an ad in the paper and then I can't even begin to describe the amount of people who came forward."
"We were equating it to any study," says Coon. "You try it for a while, look at what you can improve, and what you're doing right. The fact that [early on] they did so many tests, but only found a quarter of those receiving the tests had risk factors caused us to step back and make sure we get the right people into the program."
Knight suggests a hospital that wants to perform this kind of outreach needs marketing and communication support, and facilities shouldn't limit the outreach to just obvious choices.
"All of your support groups—stroke, cardiac, diabetes—reach out to them and invite them to your presentations as well," says Knight. "Go to their speakers' bureaus to speak to those groups."
Matt Phillion, CSHA, is senior managing editor of Briefings on The Joint Commission and senior editorial advisor for the Association for Healthcare Accreditation Professionals (AHAP).