A Quality Improvement Project to Increase Medicare Annual Wellness Visits in a Primary Care Clinic

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: This Doctor of Nursing Practice Project is a quality improvement project for a single-site primary care clinic in Tucson, Arizona. It was noticed that Medicare beneficiaries were not consistently participating in Medicare annual wellness visits. The causes were multifactorial, but for the purpose of this project, the focus for a solution became the knowledge level of providers at the clinic. The term providers includes physicians and nurse practitioners. A literature review was conducted to determine the benefits of annual wellness visits, how they may be implemented, and how to best educate providers. Using recent findings in the literature, a web-based module was developed with the intention of educating providers about Medicare annual wellness visits. METHODS: Along with an informed disclosure, pretest, and posttest, the education module was implemented using Qualtrics over a two-week period in August. The education module was emailed from the office manager to all seven providers at the primary care clinic. Three providers chose to participate in the project (N=3). RESULTS: The results comparing the responses on the pretest and posttest show that providers gained knowledge by reading the web-based education module. Providers also self-reported and increased intent in encouraging patients to schedule wellness visits. Limitations include the small sample size. CONCLUSIONS: Participants demonstrated an increase in knowledge gained about Medicare annual wellness visits as evidence by aggregated data. Participants also reported an increase intent to encourage patients to schedule wellness visits, which will potentially lead to a larger source of revenue for the clinical site of implementation.