Designing and Implementing a Patient Access Model, Children's Health

CH’s outpatient programs had historically struggled to provide timely referral processing and access to care, with new patients routinely waiting three to six months for appointments—resulting in dissatisfaction on the part of patient families and referring providers alike. When CH engaged ECG, the system had no standardized approach to scheduling, templating, evaluating capacity, or assessing and improving access.

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ECG worked with CH to evaluate its outpatient access and construct an approach to rapidly improve its outcomes.

By using Epic tools, redesigning provider templates, and optimizing nonclinical workflows, ECG’s efforts helped the pilot programs increase their average session durations and templated slots per session, adding over 160 net new slots per month for each program and increasing urology provider utilization by 11%. The standardized templates enabled online scheduling for new and established patients, introducing a digital entry point for consumers. The methodology has since been rolled out to nearly all specialties. In addition, CH used the workflows created by ECG to standardize the referral process to provide a consistent experience for patients and their families across all specialties.

ECG’s provider capacity analysis helped CH understand the variations in patient contact hours and slot count across the organization. The urology program used this information to increase session duration for 50% of provider templates, while the orthopedics group expanded 81% of its templated sessions. The analysis enabled CH to prioritize other programs for optimization based on access trends, volume, and productivity outcomes and provided a framework for robust policies and procedures regarding provider templated time.