Abstract

No-show medical appointments lead to health disparities and threaten the financial survival of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). Open access scheduling eliminates long lead times, a common reason for no-show visits. Preventive health screenings and chronic disease management were drastically reduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring innovative methods to increase access to care. The purpose of this quality improvement (QI) project was to measure the impact of an open access scheduling system on no-show rates in an urban FQHC. A pre-post observational design compared two days per week of no-show data for a span of 10 weeks between two family medicine physicians' schedules. No-show data from the pre-intervention group (N = 175) was collected from October 17, 2022–December 20, 2022 and compared to no-show data from the open access post-intervention group (N = 82) collected from October 16, 2023–December 19, 2023. No-show rates were significantly lower in the open access post-intervention group (3.5%) compared to the traditional pre-intervention group (36%), p < .0001. This project demonstrated a 90% reduction in no-show rates that shows promise open access will decrease no-show rates. Future longitudinal studies with larger FQHC populations will further add value to support the evidence. This QI project was approved by the Internal Review Board Approval (IRB) of Saint Barnabas Hospital and Union Community Health Center, a FQHC. The IRB of Georgetown University determined this project to be non-human subject research.

Description

This dissertation has also been disseminated through the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. Dissertation/thesis number: 31237689; ProQuest document ID: 3051318208. The author still retains copyright.

Author Details

Rosemary Ward, DNP, FNP-C

Sigma Membership

Theta Tau

Type

Dissertation

Format Type

Text-based Document

Study Design/Type

Quality Improvement

Research Approach

Translational Research/Evidence-based Practice

Keywords:

Advanced Access Scheduling, Community Health Centers, No-Show Rate Reduction

Advisor

Lois Wessel

Second Advisor

Margaret Slota

Degree

DNP

Degree Grantor

Georgetown University

Degree Year

2024

Rights Holder

All rights reserved by the author(s) and/or publisher(s) listed in this item record unless relinquished in whole or part by a rights notation or a Creative Commons License present in this item record.

All permission requests should be directed accordingly and not to the Sigma Repository.

All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.

Review Type

None: Degree-based Submission

Acquisition

Proxy-submission

Date of Issue

2024-08-29

Full Text of Presentation

wf_yes

Download

Share

COinS