Economic impact of prescreening on gastroenterology outpatient clinic practice

Outpatient clinic activity represents a major workload for clinicians. Unnecessary outpatient visits place a strain on service provision, resulting in unnecessary delays for more urgent cases.

We sought to determine both the impact and economic benefit of employing phone follow-up and physician assistant (PA) triage systems on attendances at a gastroenterology outpatient department.

We performed a retrospective chart review of all patients attending a gastroenterology outpatient clinic over a 2-week period. Patients were categorized into new or follow-up attendees and the follow-up patients were further subcategorized into 1 of 4 groups: (1) those attending to receive results of investigations requiring no further treatment (group A); (2) those attending to receive results of investigations requiring further treatment (group B); (3) those attending with a chronic gastrointestinal disease requiring no active change in management (group C); (4) those attending with a chronic gastrointestinal disease requiring active change in management (group D). It was assumed that patients in group A could be managed by phone follow-up in place of clinic attendance and patients in group C could be triaged to see a PA.

Out of a total of 329 outpatient attendees, 40 (12%) required no active intervention (group A) and would have been suitable for phone follow-up. A further 58 (18%) had stable disease, requiring no change in management and hence, could have been triaged to see a PA. Implementation of phone follow-up and patient review by PA could reduce salary expenses of outpatient practice by 17%.

Our findings support routine prescreening of outpatient attendees to enhance the efficiency of gastroenterology outpatient practice.