For hospitals and health systems to grow market share, retain patients, improve capacity, optimize revenue, and enhance consumer brand loyalty, they need to prioritize their consumer experience and access model — and that means engaging in enterprisewide change. This generally requires committing to a multiyear journey. The good news is that health care leaders can stage that journey to derive value at every step along the way.
Guidehouse works with hospitals and health systems to help them focus their primary improvement efforts on patient access and the consumer experience. Two hospitals — association member Tampa General Hospital, in Tampa, Fla., and Yale New Haven Health/Yale Medicine, in New Haven, Conn. — share their experiences below.
A Paradigm Shift
Over the past few years, consumer expectations have helped redefine the health care landscape — an environment turned upside down by nontraditional health care competitors, vertically integrated health care conglomerates, innovative medical and digital health technologies, and value-based reimbursement models.
The consequences of health systems ignoring the drumbeat of consumer expectations have never been clearer, as longer appointment wait times and unsatisfactory experiences with traditional health care providers are driving people to alternative virtual care options.
What’s at Stake
There’s no guarantee consumers will choose virtual care from the same provider where they would have received in-person care. Today’s health care market offers consumers a variety of virtual care options. But, even so, patient satisfaction scores are down. Pressure is on providers to act quickly and improve the consumer experience and patient access, knowing that insufficient access is directly linked to patient leakage, inadequate new patient acquisition, and shrinking “share of wallet.”
If providers want to maintain their position as the care destination of choice for their patients and communities, they must proactively overcome their consumer experience and patient access challenges.
How to Elevate the Customer Experience
Improving access and the consumer experience requires much more than opening a digital front door. It demands 24/7, omnichannel access that gives individuals what they need at that moment and exceeds their customer service expectations. Adopting consumer experience as the organization’s end-to-end, top-to-bottom core value makes that possible.
Integrated digital tools, optimized electronic health record systems, and other health information systems are the technical engines that power a comprehensive consumer experience business model. But without the model sitting on top of the engines, as a car chassis sits on top of the power train, the engines have no direction.
Guidehouse’s model features four domains:
- Clinical Connections
- Coordinated Access
- Financial Health
- Patient Engagement
The following case studies describe how two prominent health systems are using this model to enhance their consumer experience and access capabilities.
Case Study: Tampa General Hospital
Tampa General leaders knew care quality increases and costs decrease when patients can get what they need, when and where they need it, through a single interaction — whether by phone call, text, email, or asynchronous chat. But siloed, fragmented, disjointed systems conspired to make that difficult. Disparate and disconnected technologies, variations in scheduling templates and decision trees, inefficiencies in internal communication tools, and holes in access channels all complicated the system’s ability to meet consumer needs.
To remove those artificial barriers and built-in friction, leaders have developed an enterprisewide Experience Center designed to match customer service standards of other industries.
Over a 13-month period, Tampa General has:
- Built an Experience Center with centralized scheduling and referral management across primary care and more than 20 specialties
- Equipped staff with new customer relationship management competencies, tools, and technologies to enhance and speed their patient access work
- Deployed more than 230 decision trees
- Rolled out updated templates for more than 750 providers in more than 20 medical specialties
- Reduced redundant visit types by 35 percent
- Realized a 75 percent increase in available appointments online, a 47 percent increase in appointments scheduled online, and a 20 percent decrease in appointment no-show rates
The system now handles 30,000 calls per week. Tampa General is developing additional Experience Center performance metrics, including percentage of calls converted to appointments and first-call resolution rates.
Critical Success Tips
- Be patient and support your staff. Improving access is a dramatic change that takes time.
- Stay focused on your processes and information technology systems. It’s easier to blame people than to take a hard, honest look at your legacy processes and systems.
- Involve both patients and front-line team members in the design of your new access initiative. It sounds simple, but many times the users are left out.
Case Study: Yale New Haven Health/Yale Medicine
Yale New Haven Health System, a prominent five-hospital health system in Connecticut, and its affiliated multispecialty medical practice, Yale Medicine, had chronically high patient demand for care due to its enviable clinical reputation. But that also meant long patient wait times for new and follow-up appointments with primary care doctors and medical specialists. And the existing culture of high tolerance for letting patients wait wasn’t doing the system any favors.
Knowing that patients could easily turn to an in-market competitor or out-of-market virtual provider to get care faster, system leaders decided to develop an enterprisewide strategic consumer access and experience initiative, dubbed “Access 365.” Launched in early 2023, the initiative featured process improvements across ambulatory, ancillary, and inpatient care to deliver a world-class consumer connection experience.
Combining strategic, operational, and digital technology transformation, Access 365 is building a new Experience Center as a one-contact option to support patients with scheduling, clinical triage, wayfinding, pharmacy, medical record, and financial needs. Priority stages for implementation include eight distinct “waved” rollouts to redesign access-related technologies, operations, and people functions for all ambulatory and ancillary services across the enterprise.
Access 365 has kicked off with standardization of visit, template, and decision trees for the first wave of specialties (radiology, orthopedics, and primary care). The initiative tracks performance measures, such as patient lag time to first appointment, no-show rates, patient throughput capacity, call turnaround time, and call abandonment rates. Outcomes to date include:
- Increased open CT scan slots by 23 percent, resulting in a commensurate increase in actual CT scans performed
- Reduced/simplified redundant or unnecessary visit types for radiology by 81 percent
- Increased physician and advanced practice practitioner appointment capacity across Wave 1 specialties, with primary care up by more than 30 percent and orthopedics up by about 24 percent
At the completion of the ambulatory and ancillary phases, the organization will pivot to inpatient services. Leaders predict Access 365 will be fully operational in two years as they streamline workflows, integrate technologies across sites and departments, add complementary digital tools, standardize appointment types and scheduling templates, and build new measures to monitor access performance.
Critical Success Tips
- Balance your supply with demand by adding advanced practice providers and giving them their own integrated appointment types and scheduling templates.
- Create a multimodal communication plan to keep all clinical and administrative leaders up to date on your overarching access initiative and individual access projects.
- Install a sustainable structure with strong governance, formal work plan, senior leadership, and transparent performance data to keep energy high and everyone inspired.
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