AHP Practice Spotlight: Virdee Medical Group’s Success with Point-of-Care Lead Testing
January 23rd, 2019 | ArchiveAHP’s Lead Initiative launched in March 2018 with the goal of improving lead screening rates and providing education and resources around early detection, intervention and monitoring of every child that has an elevated blood lead level.
In late 2017, Virdee Medical Group began doing in-office point-of-care testing for lead and hemoglobin at both of their practice locations. They were one of the first practices AHP worked with on their Point-of-Care Lead Testing process and practice workflow in 2018. As a result, they’ve boosted their testing rates by 31%, putting them well into the 90th percentile!
Several critical success factors influenced their lead testing:
- They routinely test at the 12 month, 18 month and 2 year well child visits which offers more opportunities to catch patients who have missed their lead testing at age 1 and who may turn 2 before their scheduled 2 year well child visit.
- Their AHP Care Manager, Joanne Freeland, runs regular gap reports through Arcadia and hands off to the front desk staff to make appointments.
- Front desk staff communicate directly with their nurses via appointment notes in their EMR to ensure that kids are getting tested during their appointment and additional time is built into the patient visit to allow nursing time for doing the finger stick and running the test.
Their biggest challenge was adjusting to their new testing guidelines and making sure they were persistent with rescheduling cancels and no-shows, but once they did, it became a routine part of their workflow.
Congratulations to Virdee Medical Group on their achievement in lead testing and thank all of our practices that are doing lead testing for their continued efforts to ensure that we eliminate the lead burden for children.
Please email questions to Meagan Fournier-Boome, Project Manager for the Lead Initiative.
