Best Practices
- Cultivate support from key leaders: CEO and CMO (mission match), COO (clinic operations, workflows), CIO (data support, patient registries) and CFO (financial planning).
- Itemize necessary financial supports and resources, such as staff or IT time; pharmacy revenues may be used to fund support staff such as HCV navigators.
- Build staff buy-in from front desk to prescribers, to leadership to ensure well-coordinated patient management.
- Establish and maintain a multi-disciplinary team to manage HCV treatment. Train, establish workflows, and support multiple prescribers who treat HCV to ensure sustainability and prevent treatment interruptions during absences or position vacancies.
- Identify an on-site expert and an HCV champion to lead implementation and expansion of HCV screening and treatment in the clinic. The roles of experts and champions might be the same person, but the latter does not need to be a clinician and/or prescriber. If there is no prescriber with experience treating HCV but there is a motivated clinician, seek mentors through other clinics already successfully implementing HCV screening and treatment to develop this expertise in-house.
- Establish access to a specialist for consultation or referral for challenging cases.
- Develop team-based interprofessional systems of care.
- Focus on efforts to address and reduce stigma.
- Invest in IT to enhance EMR e.g., to create order sets, patient planning tools, integrate SBIRT, or other decision tools.
- Create clear, written procedures and workflows on which all team members are trained, and which are centrally accessible. Review these procedures periodically to ensure that the remain current.