786. Improving Access by Prescreening Self-Referred Patients to an Infectious Disease Clinic

摘要

BackgroundStudies show that 35% of patients obtaining care in a specialty clinic are self-referred, of these, 60% do not have a PCP. Frequent changing of physicians without provider referral contributes to high costs and healthcare inefficiencies. Many subspecialty clinics do not require provider referral for access, so-called: ‘self-referral’; becoming an issue when patients discern a need for a subspecialty that does not align with their disease process. The Infectious Disease (ID) Department of the Cleveland Clinic Main Campus began prescreening all self-referred patients in July 2016. (Figure 1) We reviewed this process after sustained implementation.