Improving Psychosocial Risk Assessment and Service Provision for Craniofacial Team Patients: A Quality Improvement Project

Abstract

Objective

To improve psychosocial risk assessment and service provision for children with craniofacial conditions presenting for annual interdisciplinary team visits.

Design

Institute for Healthcare quality improvement model.

Setting

U.S. pediatric academic medical center.

Participants

Caregivers of children ages 0-17 years with craniofacial conditions presenting for 1692 team visits between August 2017 and July 2019.

Interventions

Key drivers included: (1) standardizing pre-visit triage processes; (2) administering the Psychosocial Assessment Tool-Craniofacial Version (PAT-CV); (3) utilizing PAT-CV scores in real time to add patients to psychosocial provider schedules; and (4) family education. Interventions included improving patient screening, increasing PAT-CV completion rate, altering clinic flow, providing patient and parent education about psychosocial services, and altering team member roles to fully integrate PAT-CV administration and scoring in the clinic.

Main Outcome Measures

The primary outcome was the percentage of patients identified for psychosocial consultations via nurse triage, PAT-CV score, family or provider request who completed consultations. The secondary outcome was the percentage of patients completing needed psychosocial consultations based on elevated PAT-CV scores.

Results

Use of the PAT-CV resulted in an increase in the percentage of patients with elevated psychosocial risk who received a psychosocial consultation from 86.7% to 93.4%. The percentage of children receiving psychosocial consultation at their annual team visit due to elevated PAT-CV scores increased from 72% to 90%.

Conclusions

Integrating a validated psychosocial risk screening instrument can improve risk identification and psychosocial consultation completion. A combination of risk screening approaches may be indicated to identify patients in need of psychosocial services.