Kyruus Blog

The fourth Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium (ATLAS) is officially less than one month away!

The conference schedule is live and filled with dynamic speakers from forward-thinking hospitals and health systems across the country joining us for this year’s ATLAS. The program is filled with presentations and panels centered around our theme—Patient Access in Focus: Staying Ahead in a Shifting Landscape. Here are a few schedule highlights:

Health systems and hospitals are increasing their emphasis on improving patient access to attract new patients and retain existing ones. Access centers and their staff play a central role in this initiative, yet they face unnecessary hurdles with such essential tasks as finding an appropriate provider and booking appointments.

Average new patient appointment wait times have increased by 30% across the US since 2014, and at the same time provider schedules often go underutilized.  Accounting for this apparent contradiction, known as the “patient access paradox,”  has led many health systems to explore different approaches to patient access with dual goals of increasing provider schedule density and improving the patient experience.

The Annual Thought Leadership on Access Symposium (ATLAS) is a conference for healthcare executives and thought leaders to meet and exchange best practices on improving the patient experience. Through engaging presentations, panels, and networking events, attendees have the opportunity to gain powerful insights to take back to their organizations about enhancing patient access, care coordination, provider network management, digital engagement, and more.

In a previous blog post, we looked at how outdated provider directories can negatively impact patient access. This post explores the importance of effective provider data management and accurate provider directories in streamlining key operational processes across a health system.

There are so many digital marketing metrics to track, it can leave marketers with a serious case of TMI. Having too much data is overwhelming and looking at the wrong data is a waste of time. The key is to find the data that illustrates the new website visitors you’ve acquired, but also shows opportunity for meaningful optimizations. That raises the question: what metrics matter most for your hospital or health system?

In 2015, Mercy Health (Cincinnati, OH) and Summa Health (Akron, OH) formed one of the largest clinically integrated networks (CINs) in Ohio, Advanced Health Select, to enhance chronic care management and lower the total cost of care for patients in Ohio and Kentucky. Their respective ACOs were the first networks to join the CIN, linking 2,800 providers. The CIN has since expanded to include closer to 3,500 providers. We were pleased to host two leaders from these health systems on a recent webinar: J.D. Whitlock, VP of Enterprise Intelligence at Mercy Health and Ellen Smith, VP of Business Development & Access at Summa Health. Here were some of the top takeaways:

This is the third post in our Call Center Patient Experience Series. Over the course of this three post series, we’ve explored some of the top barriers to patient access through health system call centers and how they impede a positive patient experience: outdated provider directories, limited patient-provider matching capabilities, and lack of visibility into provider availability.

This is the second post in our Call Center Patient Experience Series. Over the course of this three post series, we’ll explore some of the top barriers to patient access through health system call centers and how they impede a positive patient experience: outdated provider directories, lack of patient-provider matching capabilities, and insight into provider availability.

As I sit at our NewCo Boston event in a room with almost 30 people, everyone is nodding their head as Julie Yoo, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Kyruus, speaks about how Kyruus was started. It’s in this moment that it dawns on me...we’re all patients. Regardless of where we come from, what our life experiences have been, or what industry we work in, we have all experienced the issues Julie is speaking of in one way or another. We have all experienced the “patient access paradox,” where patients are being told to wait weeks, if not months, before they can see a physician, despite hospitals and health systems commonly operating at only 60-70% capacity. Even more so, in 25% of cases patients end up being misdirected to the wrong provider, leading to waste and delays in care.