ST. LOUIS — Wendy Bivins, a lab manager and medical assistant at Total Access Urgent Care, has spent the past several months helping thousands of St. Louisans receive their COVID-19 test results faster — but she's always looking for ways to make that process better.
"As testing continued to grow in the St. Louis area, we quickly learned we needed a better and faster way to communicate these results to our patients," she said. "We began to grow and expand our lab team, training multiple clinical team members and providers to contact these patients, often completing 100-200 calls a day."
Bivins joined Total Access in 2012 as a medical assistant and was quickly promoted to a brigade leader, who oversees 15 clinical employees, and then to lab manager. In her role, Bivins oversees testing at 26 TAUC locations, which have performed over 150,000 COVID-19 tests since March.
You’ve been on the front line delivering patient care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Describe the work you’ve been doing. From swabbing patients, to communicating/managing their results, and developing new lines of communication and procedures, I have done it all through this COVID pandemic. My team and I have had to completely revamp several lab processes to fit the needs of our patients for COVID testing. We've made improvements to get the results to our patients faster — going from 10-16 days turnaround time to 24 to 48 hours. At the beginning of COVID, our lab would process each lab result separately, patient by patient, sending text messages or making phone calls to communicate them to each individual patient. Testing went through another huge surge when we added the capability to perform antibody testing and our new and improved system needed to be improved once again. So back to the drawing board we went. We retrained two to three times as many clinical and provider team members to build a large group to reach 200 to 300 patients at a time, relaying their COVID results. This improvement allowed us to contact hundreds of patients within minutes rather than individually contacting each patient, but required several team members working together to build these group messages for several hours every day. A huge improvement, but not enough to keep up with the testing demand. Our greatest improvement came just in time — after communicating for several weeks with our electronic health record program, we were finally able to build a system that allows the results to auto-populate these group messages. This massive improvement now allows us to communicate test results to thousands of patients and only requires one team member about 20 to 30 minutes each day.
What has this experience been like for you? This has been the most rewarding and challenging experience I have been a part of in my professional life. It has been so rewarding being a part of a team that has truly given their all to improve and adjust every part of our company to meet the needs of our communities. So many patients are being turned away by their primary care doctors due to COVID requirements or restrictions, and I could not be happier or more proud to be a part of a team that is opening our doors to every patient. Helping the patient who needs to catch their flight home, the man who needs to care for his elderly parents, the moms who need testing for their children to return to school safely — the list simply goes on and on of patients we are able to help on a daily basis. Of course accepting all of these patients has created several challenges for our team. I as a manager had to determine where my help/time was needed each and every single day. Every day resulted in making a new priority list, different than the day before, re-editing updates for the team due to CDC changes, and retraining staff for each and every improvement to our lab communication systems. We are a much better company and I am a better person from this experience.
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