The New Gold Standard in Surgical Pre-Op — Gastroenterology
Over 10 million outpatient surgical procedures occur in the U.S. each year.
However, despite that volume, between 3–10% of all outpatient surgical procedures are cancelled days or even hours before an appointment. Hospitals and surgical centers are suffering as a result — cancellations cause disruptions in workflow, case load, and revenue. At Tulane University Medical Center, 6.7% of all scheduled outpatient surgeries were cancelled in 2009, costing the hospital nearly $1 million.
Studies have found that the top reasons for cancellation in ambulatory settings were patient no-shows and failure to follow pre-operative guidance. The study concluded that most of the cancellations were considered preventable.
This problem is particularly pronounced in Gastroenterology
Each year, U.S. gastroenterologists care for approximately 15 million people by performing colonoscopies — the gold standard for detecting and preventing colorectal cancer. Colonoscopy and endoscopy cases make up up 24 percent of total ambulatory surgical center (ASC) case volume alone. Gastroenterologists are present in 34 percent of all ASCs and, on average, each ASC completes 3,744 GI procedures per year.
This makes for a high-volume procedure that helps physicians detect and prevent cancer for at-risk patients. However, for both doctors and their patients, uncertainty around the bowel cleansing preparation process and confusion about the procedure itself has caused 25 percent of patients to prepare inadequately for a colonoscopy procedure, leading to the cancellation of many procedures, if those patients show up at all.
What’s the average price per colonoscopy procedure?
$1,185.
That is an incredible amount of both lost revenue and poor preventive care for patients.
Patients are over six times as likely to have a cancelled procedure due to imperfect bowel prep. Even for those with imperfect preps that do continue with the procedure, physicians spend valuable procedure time washing and suctioning waste from the colon — leading to more delays and cancellations.
That being said, there’s both room for improvement and evidence of success!
A randomized controlled trial of a telephone intervention found that patients who received prep instructions over telephone the day before a procedure found a 11% increase in adequate preps and a 13% higher polyp detection rate. Similarly, patients who received educational booklets about bowel preps prior to their procedures had adequate preps at a rate 30% higher than those that did not. Patients who received prep instructions over social media had a 13% higher rate of adequate prep completion and a 6% higher rate of polyp detection relative to those that did not receive instructions.
What is clear from these studies is that giving patients the right information at the right time, along with a reference or guidance they need to properly prepare for procedures and clear their confusion is effective at both getting patients to show up and improving their doctor’s ability to provide them with the best possible clinical outcome.
A Next-Gen Approach to the New Gold Standard in Pre-Op
Because our team at Memora Health believe that in health care, the medium often helps define the message, we have distilled pre-operative preparation instructions for colonoscopy and endoscopy patients into simple, easy-to-read text messages that are accessible on any type of cell phone — no installation needed.
However, since patients often have questions or concerns about instructions and their experience taking the prep, we’ve gone one step further — separating us from traditional IT solutions in a way that maximizes patient engagement.
Memora has designed a fully interactive, artificial intelligence-powered Q&A system over SMS that allows patients to text questions or concerns they have about preparing for their procedure so that there’s no lingering anxiety to keep them from showing up on the big day.
Gastroenterologists and ASC managers, reach out at info@memorahealth.com! We’d love to work with you to help reduce no-shows, cancellations, and delayed operations while capturing lost revenue and improving patient care.
Memora Health is building the operating system for care delivery that implements intelligent, streamlined workflows and revolutionizes the patient experience outside the care setting. We offer a smart end-to-end platform that unifies fragmented health care data to enable providers, payors, and life science companies to automate care delivery operations — from patient communication to documentation to reimbursement. We uniquely use artificial intelligence to digitize existing care delivery workflows, giving clinicians infrastructure that learns from every encounter they have. Memora supports a full suite of virtual care systems from automated patient intake and scheduling to remote monitoring and care pathways to billing and documentation. Memora is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Kevin Durant, Martin Ventures, and several healthcare strategic groups.
