Maximizing efficiency and patient outcomes to meet the demands of a rapidly growing cancer institute.

e23203 Background: In 2023, the US is projected to have 1. 96 million new cancer diagnoses with a 33% decline in cancer-related deaths. The prevalence of cancer is increasing at a rate that is difficult for oncology practices across the country to manage. Improvement processes must be evaluated to address these demands and create a practice with a foundation for long-term growth, scalability, and structure. The main target of this research was to standardize practice procedures to improve communication leading to reduced variation in order entry practices that resulted in confusion for staff, interruptions for providers, and chair time delays for patients. Methods: A QI project was undertaken at a rapidly expanding community oncology practice to meet patient volume demands. Three separate areas were identified to create standardization of procedures to improve care including referral guidelines, infusion center orders, and handoffs on patient care. New patient referral guidelines were created to determine if patients met criteria for urgent referrals or needed a referral at all. In addition, infusion center guidelines were standardized to require providers to sign all orders prior to an infusion clinic appointment time. The last area addressed was creating a means of safe and effective handoff between staff members at the end of a patient appointment through required utilization of the "Wrap-Up" section in Epic. Data was collected both before and after implementation of routine practice standards in all three areas mentioned. Utilizing the data gathered over a 6-month period, comparisons were made to identify if the changes had any measurable benefit. Results: Standardization of practice procedures had a significant positive impact. Through standardization of referral guidelines, 500 patients being referred to as urgent were determined not to meet criteria for an urgent evaluation in addition to over 300 patients that did not even need to be seen. By identifying these unnecessary referrals, patients that needed to be seen could be seen sooner. In addition, improved infusion center guidelines requiring providers to sign orders prior to appointment times increased infusion volumes that had a direct margin improvement upwards of 3 million dollars over a 6-month period. The last area addressed was streamlining patient handoff that directly correlated to an average reduction of 100 monthly in-basket messages across all providers. Conclusions: By standardizing daily practices across multiple areas within the practice, there were direct measurable benefits related to each intervention. These were simple, manageable changes that most practices could easily implement to increase productivity, improve patient care, and decrease the work burden on the staff. Ultimately, these improvements led to increased patient and employee satisfaction with decreased staff turnover as observed in this study.