Fasttrack to fertility program halves time to treatment pennmedicine
Couples with infertility experience psychological distress associated with the prolonged period of recognizing a need for fertility assistance and the long journey of evaluation and management. In August 2019, Penn Medicine began developing, a novel model of care delivery to improve access to fertility care and decrease time to completion of fertility workup and, by June 2021, deployed division-wide implementation of the new care model.
Advanced practice providers conducted new-patient visits via telehealth, and patients were offered enrollment in a texting platform to assist with completion of a complex workup for both partners. Penn Medicine initially used a fake back-end texting platform and then transitioned to an artificial intelligence–augmented semi-automation approach to facilitate timely completion of the workup. The redesigned model increased annualized new patient access by 23.