Connecting the Dots: Redesigning Processes for Seamless Access 

Health systems have made significant investments in patient access over the past several years. They have expanded virtual care, modernized scheduling platforms, introduced digital navigation tools, and explored new ways to connect patients with care.

Yet many organizations continue to struggle with familiar challenges: long wait times, appointment availability constraints, fragmented patient experiences, and operational bottlenecks that prevent access initiatives from delivering their full potential.

One of the biggest operational breakdowns in access is a fragmented view of what’s actually happening.

NICOLE ALDRICHSenior Managing Consultant, Care Operations

The challenge is not a lack of effort. According to Tegria’s Access-Driven Enterprise research, health systems are investing heavily in access-enabling capabilities. However, technology investments alone do not guarantee results. Closing access gaps requires organizations to look beyond individual tools and focus on how patients move through the system as a whole.

Why Access Challenges Persist

The research revealed a clear disconnect between access ambitions and operational reality. When healthcare leaders were asked to select the barriers blocking their progress, 62% identified appointment availability, and 54% identified workforce shortages.

At first glance, these challenges may appear to be capacity problems. In many cases, however, underlying process issues make those challenges even harder to solve. In those cases, adding more providers or more appointments will not solve the problems. In fact, accelerating a broken process by opening up more appointments, without first understanding and addressing underlying issues, can make things worse.

Many health systems have evolved over time, adding new services, technologies, and workflows in response to changing patient needs. While these additions often solve immediate problems, they can also create complexity and fragmentation across the patient journey.

As a result, organizations may struggle to see how patients actually move through the system from beginning to end. Even more importantly, health systems may lose sight of the frustrations that patients experience at each touch point—and the inefficiencies that create operational problems.

“One of the biggest operational breakdowns in access is a fragmented view of what’s actually happening,” said Nicole Aldrich, R.N., senior managing consultant with care operations at Tegria. “There are a lot of entry and exit points for patients, and organizations don’t always know what they all are or how they connect, which creates problems downstream.”

Many health systems manage access through separate workflows for scheduling, registration, referrals, clinical care, and follow-up. But patients experience those interactions as a single journey. When organizations cannot clearly see how those touch points connect, gaps emerge that affect both patient experience and operational performance.

Technology Is Only Part of the Solution

Health systems continue to prioritize investments in virtual care platforms (81%), centralized scheduling systems (77%), digital navigation tools (65%), and AI-powered patient communications (61%). These investments can improve access when implemented thoughtfully. However, many organizations discover that new technology does not automatically solve longstanding operational challenges.

“Organizations often find digital tools that are really beneficial, but they layer them on top of processes that have been around for a long time,” Aldrich said. “They don’t always think about how those tools fit into existing processes or connect with the people and systems that use them.”

This helps explain why organizations can make substantial investments yet see limited improvements in performance. When new tools are introduced without redesigning the underlying processes they support, inefficiencies often remain in place.

In other words, technology can accelerate a well-designed process. It struggles to compensate for a fragmented one.

Looking Beyond Individual Departments

One of the most common pitfalls in access improvement efforts is focusing on isolated parts of the system rather than the broader patient experience, Aldrich notes. Individual clinics or departments may develop successful approaches that improve local performance. While those improvements are valuable, they do not always translate into enterprise-wide gains.

Isolated improvements can even slow down the broader patient journey. A scheduling enhancement in one service line may create bottlenecks elsewhere. Improvements in one clinic may not address challenges patients experience when transitioning between settings or specialties.

Successful organizations take a broader view. Rather than optimizing individual touch points, they examine the full pathway patients follow as they seek care, receive treatment, and navigate ongoing services.

Shifting from local optimization to enterprise process redesign is key to creating meaningful, lasting improvements. This shift helps organizations identify opportunities that may otherwise remain hidden when teams focus solely on their own areas of responsibility.

Creating Shared Ownership

Process redesign is not just about mapping workflows. It also requires clarity around ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement. Because patient journeys can be complex, access challenges often span multiple departments, making it difficult for any single team to solve them independently. Scheduling, operations, clinical leadership, digital teams, and patient experience leaders all influence access outcomes.

Organizations that make meaningful progress create structures that bring those groups together around shared goals. This type of shared ownership creates visibility across the organization and helps teams identify issues before they become larger operational problems.

“Improving access requires more than redesigning workflows. It requires a shared understanding of how work gets done, clear accountability for each step, and a continuous feedback loop to identify and address barriers,” Aldrich said.

Designing Around the Patient

At its core, access transformation is about making it easier for patients to get the care they need. That goal sounds straightforward, but it requires organizations to look beyond internal processes and consider the experience from the patient’s perspective.

When a patient seeks care, they want a smooth experience in which they feel heard and understood. Patients are not thinking about departmental structures, scheduling workflows, or organizational charts. They are trying to find care, navigate the system, and receive timely support.

The organizations making the greatest strides in access improvement are designing with those needs in mind. They are examining the entire journey, identifying friction points, and creating more connected experiences across settings and services.

As health systems continue investing in technology, workforce strategies, and digital capabilities, process redesign remains a critical piece of the puzzle. Organizations that understand how patients move through their systems—and redesign around those experiences—will be better positioned to close execution gaps and deliver meaningful improvements in access.

Improving access ultimately requires more than adding new tools. It requires connecting the dots between strategy, operations, and the patient journey.

Our previous blog, Access Starts With People: Building the Foundation for Enterprise Access Transformation, kicked off our Access-Driven Enterprise series with best practices for change management and governance. Read the full blog here.