Improving veterans' access to gastroenterology clinical care.

At a VA hospital, wait times for gastroenterology care have been in the order of 60 to 90 days for new clinic consults. Through a quality improvement process, these times were reduced to less than 30 days. With a revised triage process, the number of consults needing to be scheduled into the clinic was reduced 34%. In addition to achieving rapid clinical access, the weekly half-day clinic became less congested and more efficient. We describe this process of achieving improved access.