P-2010. The Impact of Staff-Performed Reminder Call Timing on Appointment Attendance in an Infectious Diseases Clinic

TL;DR

Changing the timing of staff reminder calls for clinic appointments from one day to two to three days before did not significantly reduce no-show rates.

Contribution

This study evaluates the impact of altering the timing of staff-performed appointment reminders in an infectious diseases clinic.

Findings

No-show rates increased slightly after changing reminder calls to 2-3 days prior, though not statistically significant.

Most no-show patients had commercial insurance, and the primary reason for missed appointments was inability to deliver the reminder call.

Abstract

Appointment attendance is an ongoing problem in many outpatient clinics. Despite adding staff-performed calls to automated calls in our Infectious Diseases (ID) clinic, we did not see benefit when staff-performed calls were done 1 day prior to appointments. We aimed to evaluate the effect of changing staff-performed calls to 2-3 days prior to the visit.

This retrospective quality improvement project occurred in an ID clinic at a 359-bed Rhode Island community hospital. The clinic had 2 providers who see non-HIV patients. The staff performed reminder calls to patients who did not confirm appointments through the automated reminder calls. The timing of the reminder call was changed from 1 day to 2-3 days prior to appointment date to provide patients with more notice. The change started on May 26th, 2023. Data from a 6-month period before the change (November 1st, 2021-May 31st, 2022) were compared to data from a 10-month period after implementation (June 1st, 2023- March 31st, 2024).

There were 321 patients scheduled when the reminder call was being done 1 day before appointment, 21 patients (6.54%) did not show up. There was a total of 607 patients after the change was implemented, of which 67 (11.03%) were no-shows. The no-show rate increased 4.49% after the call was performed 2-3 days earlier (P-value 0.094). The no-show rate for the first and second providers was 5.68% and 7.59% before the change and 8.7% and 13.87% after the change respectively. This indicated an increase of 3.02% (P-value 0.3791) and 6.28% (P-value 0.148) respectively. Insurance type and reason for the no-show were analyzed in the second period. Most of the no-shows had commercial insurance 79.1% (53 patients). Forty-eight no-shows had a known reason. The most common reason was the inability to deliver the reminder call to patients.

Changing reminder calls from 1 day to 2-3 days prior to ID clinic appointment did not significantly impact no-show rates. No-show patients were most often insured by commercial plans. The most common reason for no-show was inability to deliver reminder calls. Further studies are needed to explore additional strategies to improve appointment adherence and related barriers.

All Authors: No reported disclosures

Figures