A Quality Improvement Initiative to Improve Secure Patient Upload of Urgent Postoperative Digital Photographs

OBJECTIVES: Digital photography is a highly useful and increasingly widespread tool for remote postoperative triaging of patient concerns, especially during after-hours settings. As this tool becomes a standardized component of medical workflows, safeguards must be placed to ensure the secure transfer of this protected health information through official encrypted channels. To address this concern, our group conducted a quality improvement initiative to increase the proportion of patients who can upload photographs through official dashboards, such as MyChart in Epic, during after-hours calls. METHODS: Our group conducted a multidisciplinary collaboration to identify reasons as to why patients were unable to provide photographs through MyChart. Interventions to facilitate patient education and workflow were developed and tested through Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles. RESULTS: A total of 122 patient encounters were included in our study. Interventions included specially designed handouts and streamlining provider workflows to educate patients about photograph upload. The proportion of after-hours callers who uploaded a photograph to MyChart when requested increased from 44% to 78%. One year after the conclusion of our study, sustainment data over a 3-month period showed that 72% of patients continued to practice secure photograph upload practices. CONCLUSIONS: Our group aimed to improve the rate of patient-mediated photograph uploads through MyChart for secure, HIPAA-compliant data transfer. Our findings demonstrated that patients may initially face challenges navigating these digital platforms. We present several interventions that can be easily adopted by institutions seeking to strengthen postoperative triaging and patient safety.