Coming Together to Improve Contraceptive Care for Women

By Dr. Yesmean Wahdan

“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” — Jane Goodall

What drives me every day I come to work is the potential to impact the greater good. To look for opportunities to enhance and enrich the lives of the patients we serve by working to boost their health education and access to care.

I had a unique opportunity to do just that when Geisinger, one of the largest integrated health services organization in the country, approached the Women’s Healthcare team at Bayer with a request to collaborate on a challenge they were grappling with — how to reduce unintended pregnancy rates within their health system, which sees several hundred thousand patients a year.

Working together, our teams realized that there was room to improve and standardize the process for how women were receiving contraceptive counseling.

There’s a lot that needs to be covered in a woman’s health visit and we focused our efforts on identifying a solution to help ensure that the right conversations happen at the right time between a woman and her healthcare provider.

That’s how we came up with the idea of the pre-visit questionnaire, the focus of which is understanding a woman’s plans to become pregnant. Understanding a patient’s contraceptive needs and educating them prior to their health visit is critical. Now every women’s health visit at Geisinger will accompany a short pre-visit questionnaire that triggers a set of questions for the healthcare provider and will result in a more productive, comprehensive discussion about contraceptive options during the woman’s visit.

Our goal throughout this collaboration was to help ensure Geisinger patients are actively involved in personal contraception decisions and I’m so proud of the work we did together because this new counseling pathway empowers women to take control of their reproductive life planning decisions — whether to have a baby, when to have a baby, and the timing between babies — all decisions that can have a long-term impact on a woman and her family.

Enhancing the quality of patient care is at the heart of everything we do at Bayer and it was wonderful to work with the Geisinger team who shares the same mission and ethos. Together we channeled this passion into a partnership that will enhance the healthcare experience for these patients. Having the opportunity to work on an initiative like this and make a real difference in patient’s lives is an honor and privilege that drives me each and every day and why I’m so very proud to work at Bayer.

Click here to learn more about the Geisinger and Bayer contraceptive counseling initiative.