A 5 page paper proposing investigation of the time required for patients requesting records to receive them. The paper proposes combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, quantitative to establish time studies along each point of the request fulfillment process, qualitative to determine patients’ perceptions of the time required to fill their records requests. Researchers anticipate exposing one or more points along the process path that can be altered to reduce patient waiting time and thereby improve perceived quality of service. They expect to be able to identify points during the process at which they can improve the process of supplying records to waiting patients. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
Name of Research Paper File: CC6_KSresPropWait.rtf
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Patient grousing at having to wait for long periods of time in doctors offices is long-standing and comes complete with statements along the lines of billing the doctor for work
time lost to sitting in the doctors waiting room. There has been less attention to waiting times for other health services, however, particularly in services such as providing patient
records to waiting patients. In the still-evolving changing health care landscape, attention to all areas of quality is a worthy pursuit. Of
course medical care must be high quality, and that has received the greatest share of quality-related attention. Quality in other aspects of health care are important too, and the
reduction of waiting times has become an important indicator of quality in health care. The purpose of the study proposed here is to discover patient attitudes and reveal average
waiting times that patients invest in an outpatient clinic records department. Literature Review Though much attention has been given to increasing quality in
health care and it is an accepted fact that reducing waiting times is an indicator of quality, there remains a dearth of published research addressing the issue. There are
some studies that address waiting times that patients invest in seeing physicians, however. McCarthy, McGee and OBoyle (2000) provide one such study. Surveying patients in Ireland, these researchers
found that most patients (64 percent) were greatly dissatisfied with the time that they had to invest in waiting for physician attention, whether that waiting time consisted of long lead
times in gaining appointments or focused on the time that they had to wait in doctors waiting rooms on the day that their appointment finally arrived. Most were not
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