Kyruus Blog

With great certainty, we get patients to the right doctors — every time.
– Andi Kolodny, Director, Physician Referral Services at Hospital for Special Surgery

At Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), one of the nation’s leading orthopedic hospitals, providers are grouped into very specialized service lines. When appropriate routing requires such a granular knowledge of providers’ unique expertise, Andi Kolodny’s team in the Physician Referral Services Center rely heavily on rich provider information to help them make quick, informed decisions about which providers a patient should see. By leveraging a centralized provider directory, the HSS team is able to understand each physician’s unique expertise, as well as logistical information to meet patients’ needs (e.g., insurances accepted and provider practice locations), and get patients to the right provider, every time.

In an article, "Healthcare can take a lesson from the airline industry, doctors say,” FierceHealthcare recently covered an opinion piece by Sinsky and Privitera from JAMA which highlights the need to improve the clinical work environment by essentially creating a less cluttered mental landscape for physicians. This isn’t proposing we teach a greater resiliency to putting up with the clutter, but instead addresses the meaningful ways in which we might create better and safer working conditions. 

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.

"You can’t have an e-commerce or online strategy without a catalog, it’s impossible. ...It’s the foundational struts of everything else that you do."
– Aaron Martin, EVP, Chief Digital Officer at Providence St. Joseph Health

We all make dozens of decisions a day, many of which are informed by data. From the recommended products we buy on Amazon to precision cancer treatments, data serves as the foundation to many of the choices we make. However, even when we’re surrounded by data, it isn’t always accessible. Many of today’s patients, for example, are acting more like savvy consumers and are conducting research on providers before booking an appointment.

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.

“Patient access” is a health system’s ability to ensure that patients can obtain care from the right provider who can address their clinical needs while also meeting important logistical requirements and personal preferences. Patient access challenges can stem from difficulties in scheduling, a poorly designed website, and an inability to route patients to providers effectively – among other things. Read on to learn five red flags that indicate your patients may be struggling to access timely and effective care.

Finding the right match between consumers and providers is a key part to establishing a long-term relationship between patients and healthcare providers. Health systems are well-equipped to facilitate the relationship and consumers recognize their critical role in this.

Healthcare consumers are becoming savvy shoppers. Our research conducted in the summer of 2017 shows that while many consumers still prefer traditional methods for finding providers (such as referrals from healthcare providers), most are performing some level of due diligence before booking appointments—and they're going online to do their research. Learn more about how consumers access healthcare providers in the 2017 Patient Access Journey Report.