Quality Improvement Goes Viral: South Carolina’s New STD Patient Management System

In 2011, the Public Health Foundation, a national nonprofit organization, provided South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control staff with training in quality improvement to equip the health department to begin using quality improvement tools and methods to strengthen the effectiveness of all of its administrative and programmatic initiatives. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control made the decision to focus on patient wait times and ultimately designed the Fast Track program, which used nonnursing clinic staff to test asymptomatic clients for STDs.

The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control pilot-tested this new model in three different counties and

• Reduced client wait times
• Increased staff morale
• Allowed clinic staff to identify new STD cases

After achieving positive results in the pilot test sites, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control launched Fast Track in STD clinics statewide. In the first six months of statewide deployment—

• 135 new STD cases, including 12 cases of HIV, were identified among 1,500 clients without symptoms
• Clinic wait times for Fast Track clients averaged 21 minutes, compared with 60-minute wait times before Fast Track was implemented

As a result of the successful use of quality improvement techniques to improve STD testing, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control is now applying similar techniques to its Field Delivered Therapy program, in which a single dose protocol of oral medication to treat certain STDs is provided by a public health worker in the field.

To spread the word about the success of Fast Track, the Public Health Foundation and the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control together created three educational videos about the quality improvement experience. The videos are available online at www.phf.org/SCQIvideos.