Introduction: Due to the complexity of diagnosis and treatment of Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), providers observe a large volume of patient inquiries at the Call Center, resulting in a significant investment of time on the part of the providers and support staff, as well as re-routing of clinical workflow. The objective of this study is to identify the major types of inquiries made, and to implement changes in delivery of care provider workflow which will result in decreased time burden on providers and improve patient care. Methods: For a month (March 2016), patient calls taken by the IBD nurse coordinator were collected. These were subsequently categorized by types of concern. Workflow changes such as distribution of informational “biologics packets”, encouragement of use of electronic portal, sub-specialization of the workflow of the nurse coordinators and partnership with specialty pharmacies/infusion center were implemented. Patient calls taken by the IBD nurse coordinator were collected again for a month (May 2017), to assess any impact of the above changes. Results: A total of 507 phone calls and 204 phone calls were recorded during March 2016 and May 2017, respectively. Figure 1 compares the number of phone calls related to the top ten patient concerns during the March 2016 and May 2017 and Figure 2 shows the percentage distribution of the calls related to each category in the two months. Multiple patient inquiries including scheduling next infusion dose, insurance inquiry, medication refill, rescheduling appointments, and medical record requests did not necessitate direct physician input, and comprised 37% of all patient calls in March 2016 and 33% in May 2017. Conclusion: Our study evaluated the current workflow of the IBD triage call center through identifying and characterizing the current input of phone calls. Workflow changes based on the analysis of frequent calls received by the call center can help decrease the administrative burden immensely.
