Kyruus Blog

The Healthcare Call Center Times Conference hosts healthcare leaders from across the country passionate about empowering their call centers to improve patient access. This year highlighted the growing importance of the call center in a health system’s strategy. Throughout the conference, three key themes stood out as critical ways call centers are thinking about their role in driving customer engagement and retention:

Health systems have a multitude of “front doors” (i.e., patient access points) and, as today’s care networks continue to evolve in size and scope, linking those points is becoming a growing priority. Recently, Katie Logan, VP of Experience at Piedmont Healthcare and Andy Hare, Associate VP of Access Services at UAB Medicine, joined Healthcare Informatics and Kyruus on a webinar, “Taking a Multi-Channel Approach to Access.” Both Piedmont Healthcare and UAB Medicine are pursuing significant initiatives to transform how patients access their health systems and transition within them.

Last year in our centralized patient access webinar series with Culbert Healthcare Solutions, we discussed top things health system leaders need to know about access centers, focusing primarily on processes, technology, and staffing. In this blog, we will highlight the benefits of centralized access from the patient’s perspective by contrasting two different patient access scenarios.

Taking a look back at our most popular content pieces from 2017, one thing is clear—health system leaders are focusing on enhancing patient access and providing a consistent enterprise-wide patient experience. Health systems are evaluating their current patient access models to determine if they’re meeting patients’ preferences to schedule appointments in an efficient manner and they’re staying ahead of the latest healthcare consumer trends–online and offline–to establish priorities for the coming years.

Throughout the year we have posted blogs from subject matter experts sharing their expertise in patient experience and access. A common theme of our 2017 top viewed blog posts is understanding the patient journey of care. As the posts suggest, health systems must adapt to the evolving way in which patients are now obtaining information about their care and the providers they are choosing to receive that care from. Patients are behaving increasingly like consumers of healthcare and as such, health systems must adjust their strategies to align with this shift.

Health systems across the country are increasingly creating centralized access centers in order to improve patient access. We recently partnered with Culbert Healthcare Solutions to deliver a three-part webinar series focusing on the different aspects of transitioning to a centralized patient access model. Missed the webinars? Access them at the links below or check out our key takeaways from the series.

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.

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.