Establish Clinical Practice Guidelines
You know the importance of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), which provide a foundation for decisions, protocols, and best practices in patient care, but have you established guidelines for your allergy department?
Documenting your process clearly and comprehensively provides your team the blueprint for managing every potential allergy patient who walks through your doors, so you don’t miss an opportunity to serve your patients.
And make sure your team doesn’t miss the guidelines. When creating your CPGs, develop a communication plan and implementation process for rolling out and periodically reviewing them with your providers and other applicable staff.
Focus on the Processes That Matter
There’s a good amount of reality checking that goes into preparing clinical practice guidelines. Taking a cold, hard look at every rung in your process and protocols — including evaluating each step’s purpose and impact — helps you cull the parts that don’t meaningfully contribute.
What’s the process for identifying which patients are appropriate for immunotherapy? Which actions facilitate getting the right allergy patients into the right treatment course? These types of questions get to the heart of determining what steps truly need to be part of your process and your guidelines.
Make Sure Everyone’s On Board
It goes without saying that clinical practice guidelines can work only if they’re followed. Making sure staff across the board are adhering to the guidelines is an important part of ensuring quality, consistency, efficiency, and duplicability.
Do you have a mechanism or protocol in place to ensure all staff are following your CPGs? Regardless of your method, be sure to follow a consistent schedule in verifying compliance across the department.
Maintain a Strong Follow-Up Protocol
Every practice has a certain number of patients who were tested for allergies but didn’t move forward with the recommended treatment. Don’t miss the opportunity to help these patients and provide the care they need.
How can you turn this situation around to the benefit of the patient and your practice? Create a targeted follow-up process that includes:
- A monthly phone call to all patients who (1) have orders for treatment less than 90 days old, (2) have a doctor’s treatment recommendation less than 90 days old, or (3) are more than a week but less than 90 days past their recommended treatment date.
- Quarterly letters to patients who (1) have orders for treatment older than 90 days, (2) have a doctor’s treatment recommendation older than 90 days, or (3) are over 90 days past their recommended treatment date.
Developing and consistently adhering to a follow-up protocol allows you to:
- Demonstrate continued commitment and concern for your patients’ well-being
- Further build connections and relationships with your target patients
- Identify, manage, and overcome patient objections and concerns
- Motivate the patients to come back in for their recommended treatment
Save Time With ClarityTM Allergy Software
With so many patients coming through your doors, every minute of your practice’s time matters. That’s why we developed Clarity, a groundbreaking allergy software solution that:
- Saves up to 33% in allergy testing time
- Eliminates time-consuming paperwork through a web-based interface
- Lets you train new staff in days versus months with 100% confidence
- Helps you track the right data — including patient compliance and more
- Allows you to run key reports with the click of a button
Clarity’s platform — intuitive, simple to learn, and customized to your practice’s protocols — provides on-screen guidance for every step of allergy testing, mixing, and treatment, so staff don’t miss a thing. Watch the Clarity demo below to see it in action and contact us today for your own personalized live demo.
*National Wildlife Federation. Extreme Allergies and Global Warming. https://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Global-Warming/Reports/NWF_AllergiesFinal.ashx. Accessed Oct. 11, 2017.