IBD Qorus: Urgent Care Best Practices
Because of the intermittent nature of inflammatory bowel diseases, patients often need to access urgent and unplanned healthcare services, where they may undergo testing and receive treatments that can interfere with their long-term disease management plan.
Through the collective efforts of IBD Qorus sites, we were able to identify and implement specific interventions in various clinic settings that helped us pinpoint those patients at increased risk and intervene before an unplanned visit to the emergency department.
After applying these interventions in practice and analyzing the data, improvement was noted across multiple measures, including reducing the need for urgent care, hospitalization, and opioids among patients participating in the program (reference):
The most common interventions that sites used to achieve these results were: high-risk patient lists, proactive calls to high-risk patients, reserved urgent care appointments, and patient education materials about when and how to seek urgent care.
Upon further analysis, it was also discovered that implementation of these interventions (thereby reducing unplanned healthcare utilization) was associated with an annual cost savings of $2,500 per patient (reference).
To help you reduce unplanned healthcare utilization at your clinic, we have created an Urgent Care Best Practices Toolkit. The Toolkit reviews these interventions and contains helpful tips and resources for implementing these interventions in practice.
Browse the Toolkit:
Proactively Manage your High-Risk List
Offer Urgent Care Appointments
Educate Patients About When and How to Access Urgent Care
For more information on how to implement these urgent care best practices at your site, contact James Testaverde, Senior Director, IBD Qorus Implementation at [email protected]
This project is supported by a grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.
