Military health care providers should turn to automated systems to help address a growing problem at military health clinics: missed appointments.
That was one of the topics discussed at a WebHall sponsored by the Defense Department’s Military Health System April 25. Participants posted questions and comments on a message board on MHS’ Web site, and several military medical officials responded to them.
Tammie Mills, a family readiness support assistant, commented that health care providers often complain to her about the high rate of missed appointments at military facilities.
“It seems to me that the issue is not lack of resources but lack of enforcement of missed-appointment consequences,” Mills wrote. “Obviously, the current system is not working.”
In response, Col. John Kugler, deputy medical director at the Tricare Management Activity, said automated tools could help.
“Some [military treatment facilities] have utilized automated phone reminder systems to effectively reduce the incidence of missed appointments,” Kugler wrote.
“Fortunately, there are readily available programs that provide clinic leaders with missed-appointment information that they can use to assess their own clinic and to look at the effectiveness of locally derived solutions,” he added.
The Tricare Operations Center created an Appointment Activity Tool, Kugler said, adding, “Clinic managers can drill down to facility-, clinic- and even provider-level data, which can be used to identify problem areas and design solutions.”
The perennial issue of information sharing between DOD and the Veterans Affairs Department also came up during the online discussion. In response to a question, Col. Jimmie Keenan, chief of staff for the Army Medical Action Plan, indicated that the departments are “working to improve the way we share information. We continue to work with our deployed medical units to ensure we capture this data and get it into the electronic database.”
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