Consumer-centric approach to enhance access to pediatric specialty care.

Abstract

Health systems must adapt to an increased consumer-centric environment to remain relevant in an ever-growing competitive health care landscape in which convenience is a key driver of patient satisfaction and loyalty. To adapt to this new environment, health systems must redesign processes to transform the delivery of ambulatory care and provide near real-time access to specialty care. A pediatric academic medical center in western Pennsylvania used a process-improvement approach to enhance timely access to specialty care and deliver a consumer-centric patient experience. Critical factors in this process included engagement of key stakeholders, implementation of scheduling best practices, development of a set of scheduling guidelines, increased use of advanced practice providers, and use of data analytics to measure and benchmark performance. The time to schedule a new patient appointment decreased from 42 to 4 days and the patient satisfaction access domain increased by 57 percentile points. These factors should scale to other institutions, thereby enabling generalizable results.