NewsDetail
Hamad Medical Corporation’s (HMC) Internal Medicine Clinic marked its one-year anniversary this week.
The service, which is part of Hamad General Hospital (HGH), provides follow up care for patients and was established to help streamline outpatient appointments at the country’s largest hospital. The clinic also takes appointments from other HMC facilities.
Located within Hamad bin Khalifa Medical City, the Internal Medicine Clinic focuses on providing high-quality, accessible care to patients with chronic co-morbidities in an outpatient setting, and is an important component of HMC’s ongoing transformation of its clinical services.
HGH Medical Director, Dr. Yousef Maslamani thanked staff for their efforts during the course of the year in successfully implementing the new service.
“The Internal Medicine Clinic has established within HMC new practice models, systems and tools to enhance continuity of care for patients affected by chronic illness, and has been particularly successful in utilizing subspecialty services when patients are affected by more than one disease. The staff have implemented this new model very well, and the clinic and patients have benefitted greatly as a result,” he said.
HMC’s Chairman of Internal Medicine, Prof. Abdul-Badi Abou Samra, said the Internal Medicine Clinic has been popular with patients.
“Patient satisfaction surveys have shown that over 90% of respondents would recommend the Internal Medicine Clinic to family and friends and our overall satisfaction rate is between 98 – 100%,” she said.
The Internal Medicine Clinic currently handles around 1,000 patients per month, and also coordinates patient referrals from all of HMC’s general hospitals, as well as Qatar Biobank, the HGH Emergency Department and HMC Mobile Doctors.
The clinic is staffed with doctors, nurses, pharmacists and administrators, and has been designed to minimize the movement of patients, who receive all care in the same examination room, with clinicians moving around the patient.
Features include the co-location of outpatient and key support services, including treatment rooms, pharmacy and laboratory services. This closer collaboration between care providers across multiple services is designed to enhance the overall patient experience.
The Internal Medicine Clinic represents a new approach to HMC’s chronic disease management care services by seeking to reduce patient waiting times and enrich the patient experience and their clinical outcomes.
