A few years ago, University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center was struggling to address bottlenecks, with patients waiting 27 days for one type of procedure. But radiologists at the Dallas-based institution have been able to drop that number by 22% while also boosting procedures completed.

UT Southwestern was able to vastly improve throughput for the placement of infusion ports with two quick changes in its electronic medical record, experts detailed Wednesday in Current Problems in Diagnostic Radiology. The issue was particularly urgent, given concerns about keeping patients waiting for chemotherapy, which could reduce survival rates.

Building changes into the scheduling system while working closely with referring clinicians were both essential to reducing bottlenecks, advised Joseph McDevitt, MD, MBA, and colleagues. Long wait times had some docs considering looking elsewhere for referrals, but engaging them to address the problem proved fruitful.

“The fact that volumes of referred ports continue to increase throughout the project is evidence of the satisfaction of the referring services,” McDevitt—a former rad resident who now works with the Boston Consulting Group in D.C.—and colleagues wrote Sept. 2.

It was back in 2017 that UT Southwestern saw wait times for the placement of ports in interventional radiology nearly double, up to 27 days, over a four-month span. After conducting a root-cause analysis to pinpoint the problem, the team found two drivers: inadequate provider capacity for pre-procedural visits in the IR clinic and not enough slots for port placement on the angiography schedule. To remedy these issues, McDevitt et al. added two extra appointment slots per day for the former and reserved three more in the angiography suite.

The team looked to hardwire the changes by modifying the electronic clinic scheduling template. The additional appointment blocks could only be released if they sat unused for two days prior to the date.