Advancing Ambulatory Access

We had a lot of meetings before the meetings before the meetings.

We actually also did a lot of research outside of our organization.

We pinged probably four or five other institutions outside of UAB who we had heard had gone through a similar process in regards to template optimization.

And those were enlightening.

Not just to hear about their successes, but to also hear about their barriers, where they stumbled, who did they engage early on that were champions for them, and who did they wish that they engaged early on.

That's where we came up with the concept of getting the entire department leadership involved.

When it comes to the clinic leadership, not just the frontline people, they are really where a lot of the great ideas come from, from a frontline perspective.

But managing just expectations and then getting buy-in from the bottom up, it was helpful to help show that this isn't something that we're just doing in a silo.

These are areas of opportunities that people across the country are recognizing.

That was the biggest light bulb that went off when we started talking to some of these other organizations.

During the Vizient collaborative report outs.

We were exposed to a lot more organizations that were having access problems and hearing their story, how they approach certain problems was helpful.

It wasn't necessarily tied to the template journey that we were about to embark on, but just understanding how they engaged people around the organization to make it work.

The other thing I'll say is we engaged our access center colleagues pretty early on to their centralized hub where our templates live, where people call to get an appointment, engaging them early to understand once we do this, how is this going to impact their workflow? What ideas did they have? What were things that maybe they've tried in the past that we were not aware of that didn't work or that they wanted to iterate somehow that we could build upon? That was the very early stages, understanding that we had support across our organization and then making sure that we did our homework.

I would assume that since you were able to make those contacts with peers that have been on a similar journey, you're not starting from scratch.

You can take the lessons learned of what would they have done differently to really optimize your work.

We were even able to see the end point because they had started this process a few years prior.

And so they had metrics that they had been measuring pre-implementation, post-implementation.

That's what tells the story is how has this impacted the patient in a positive way? If that's the one positive we get out of that, then I feel like it's a win.

You want to see the financial contributions follow suit because those are just downstream effects.

But we're in the business of helping the communities that we serve.

And once we were able to see that where third available appointments were essentially cut in half or even just cut to where people were getting in within the week, that's really all we needed to see.

That is phenomenal.

I'm sure your patients are loving that and appreciative

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