Patient Peace of Mind with Clinic Safety Measures Using Epic

Many preventive care visits, like cancer screenings and immunizations, were postponed due to COVID-19. To encourage patients to come in for important routine care, healthcare organizations are using Epic to share updates on safety measures that are in place and reschedule preventive care visits.

Group Health Cooperative – South Central Wisconsin, for example, sends regular emails and MyChart messages with details about when clinics are open and new safety measures. At Geisinger, Mayo Clinic, and Advocate Aurora Health, clinicians use reports in Epic to find patients with recently canceled appointments and reach out to them to reschedule. Before each visit, staff call patients to walk through what to expect.

On the day of their visit, patients at Advocate Aurora can use MyChart to complete registration before they arrive. Doing so reduces the time they spend inside and the potential for exposure to the virus. When patients arrive, they’re asked to wait in their car until staff notify them with a call, text, or MyChart message.

“We’re doing everything we can to make clinic visits safe for our patients and ensure they have a positive, stress-free experience. We call it our ‘Safe Care Promise,’” said Dr. Gary Stuck, Advocate Aurora Health’s CMO.

For more information about these approaches, Epic community members can read the Patient Confidence in a Pandemic document on the UserWeb. To implement similar workflows, they can use the Managing Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) With Epic white paper.