At a recent meeting we were discussing ways to follow up with patients/families who are late for well visits and vaccines.
Currently if the patient misses a scheduled well visit (or any visit) staff members get in touch by phone and/or mail to reschedule. A problem is that if after, for example, the 2 month well visit the parent never schedules the 4 month well visit, we don’t have a way of knowing that patient is behind. Whenever possible at episodic visits, the provider will check if the patient is up to date on well visits/vaccines, and also if possible, change that episodic visit to a well visit to catch up.
Some strategies we are considering are:
1) Running reports on each provider’s patient panel to see which, for example, 4 month olds haven’t been seen in the past 2 months, which 13 month olds haven’t received their 1st MMR, etc. We imagine this would be time consuming and also would need to be done periodically.
2) Scheduling all infants’ 1st year visits at once, for example, at the newborn visit, booking their 1 month, 2 month, 4 month, etc. visits. We imagine this might be met with some resistance from parents (I resisted when my own kids’ pediatrician did this) but at least we would have appointments in eCW that the parent would get a reminder call for, and that if missed our staff would follow up on.
Interested to hear how other practices have used eCW to follow up on well visit and immunization schedules! (I am going to pose this question also to the pediatric specific group but am currently having technical difficulties with Google 
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