Patient Flow Analysis as a Tool to Improve Women's Health Services

Background: Many factors influence access to health care services, including timeliness. The purpose of this study is to identify areas for quality improvement during patient visits, with the intent of increasing access to and satisfaction with women's health services in a local public health clinic.

Methods: Time information was collected during all services provided in two local health department clinics in Madison County, Kentucky. The investigators collected data on 931 appointments. Data was analyzed as a whole and by service area; in this study the investigators focused on family planning and well woman services (women's health services). They reviewed data on 79 women's health visits in two local health clinics. Data was entered by date of service in WinPFA, a program offered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data was then exported into SAS in order to combine daily results.

Results: The study identified possible areas for future quality improvement interventions and created baselines for comparison. Possible focus areas include: average length of time for nurse component of family planning visits, patient wait time for clinician, and wait time for mammogram scheduling.

Conclusion: PFA is an effective technique to identify areas for quality improvement. Data from WinPFA can be imported to Statistical Analysis Software (SAS) for processing of multi-day samples. Results of the study will be used to redesign women's health services so that more women in target populations have access to customer-focused, quality care.