A patient access center assessment revealed opportunities to unlock 2,495 physician appointments.  

At a Glance

Background 

Streamlining patient access was a top priority for Lee Health, one of Florida’s largest nonprofit health systems. With more than two million patient contacts each year and a large population of winter residents creating seasonal spikes in demand, Lee Health needed to create a consistent, efficient experience for every patient. But without standardized scheduling practices, patients and staff had to navigate a complicated network of calendars to find an appointment.  

To improve patient experiences and reduce wait times, Lee Health engaged Tegria to perform a patient access center assessment and provide a roadmap for strategic improvements. “The Lee Physician Group was looking for immediate improvements in patients’ perceptions of access,” said Rich Cameron, Lee Health Manager for Corporate Systems. “We wanted to know how to improve service to patients.” 

Solution 

To inform the roadmap, Tegria collected data from Lee Health patients and staff using web, telephony, Epic, interviews, and patient outreach.   

Data Collection and Analysis 

Patient Journey Interviews 

Objective: Provide perspective as to how processes and technology impact the patient experience. 

Call Study 

Objective: Provide First Contact Resolution (FCR) data. 

Epic Access Audit 

Objective: Provide actionable analysis of how effectively Epic is configured and leveraged.   

Maturity Model 

Objective: Assessment of Organizational maturity across four domains: people, process, technology, and data.   

Voice of Team Survey 

Objective: Understand propensity for change and opportunities for improvement from front-line team members.

Data analysis helped uncover the factors contributing to patients’ perceptions of access and identify opportunities for improvement: technology, training, workflow, reporting, and teamwork. 

Results

Tegria’s assessment uncovered four key areas of opportunity across six categories: 

Opportunities:​ 

• Patients’ perceptions of appointment availability and scheduling 
• Ability to schedule and manage own appointments​ 
• Quicker turnaround on specialty visits​ 
• Practice level training, support, retention​ 

Categories:​

• Analytics​
• Template Redesign​ 
• Knowledge Management Systems (KMS)​ 
• Training & Retention​ 
• Quality Assurance (QA)​ 
• Workforce Management (WFM)  

The analysis revealed that a scheduling template could unlock available provider time to increase access and improve scheduling. By decreasing unavailable time by 10%, Lee Health could add up to 2,495 patient appointments and over $404K in revenue.

Expected Benefits

Financial Opportunity: Unavailable Time Usage to Schedulable Time: 1,247.5 hours (6 month analysis)

Equipped with a data-driven roadmap, Lee Health’s leaders can drive strategic initiatives to expand access to care and improve how care is perceived by patients. “The Tegria assessment was worth every penny,” said Andrew Hart, Lee Health Director of Corporate Systems. “Tegria helped us uncover the breaks in the processes, and based on their experiences, what would work well. That translated into our action plan. It bridged ‘what’s the problem?’ to ‘how do we fix it?’”