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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Recorded presentation

Linda Prine, MD, The Center for Reproductive Health Education in Family Medicine, 126 Fifth Avenue, Suite 805, New York, NY 10011, 917-520-2889, lindaprine@earthlink.net, Lauren Oshman, MD, Department of Family Medicine, Beth Israel, 16 East 16th Street, New York, NY 10003, and Lisa M. Maldonado, MPH, Reproductive Health Access Project, P. O. Box 21191, New York, NY 10025.

Approximately 1.3 million abortions are performed in the US each year. While the overall number of abortions has been declining, the rate among poor women continues to rise. New York City's unintended pregnancy rate has held steady at 60% for ten years. In 2003, there were more than 100,000 unintended pregnancies and about 75,000 abortions.

Widely available emergency contraception (EC) could decrease the need for abortions by 50%. Unfortunately, a recent survey of NYC primary care clinicians found that only 57% provide contraceptive counseling to their reproductive age patients.

In urban New York City, the Institute for Urban Family Health (IUFH) clinics care for approximately 75,000 patients. In mid-2005, this organization's leaders agreed to a protocol whereby any woman who requested EC by phone could have it called into her pharmacy immediately. Several IUFH practices made this information widely known to the practitioners and nurses in the practice, distributing and posting the new protocol. Other practices did nothing new. We will present the Electronic Health Record (EHR) report on the differences in the prescribing practices between two representative IUFH sites. We will report on patient race and ethnicity in the prescribing patterns. We will illustrate the benefits of using the EHR to track practice improvements and identify needs for further intervention.

Learning Objectives:

• 1. Describe the untapped promise of emergency contraception in decreasing the unintended pregnancy rate.
• 2. List the questions needed for an emergency contraception telephone triage protocol.
• 3. Explain the usefulness of the electronic health record in tracking prescription-writing patterns.

Keywords: Reproductive Health, Access and Services

Related Web page: www.reproductiveaccess.org

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No

Recorded presentation