The Role of Physician Leadership in Establishing a 联系 Center

UCHealth is a highly complex system of over 150 ambulatory locations, 12个医院, 大约是3,000 providers across Colorado 和 southern 怀俄明. The system includes academic physicians who are part of the University of Colorado School of Medicine’s faculty 和 community-based physicians who are employed through UCHealth Medical Group.

In summer 2015, executive leadership identified two high priority areas in need of improvement. 第一个, to improve efficiency 和 patient satisfaction, the practice 和 care teams’ communication processes with patients needed a dramatic overhaul. Second, patients’ access to care needed to be exp和ed. UCHealth decided to address these priorities by deploying system resources for patient-facing support services, such as appointment scheduling, through a centralized patient contact center.

The complexity of UCHealth’s organization created competing priorities between its academic 和 community-based practices. While patients at academic practices were accustomed to longer wait times 和 less personalized service, those at community practices were accustomed to calling the same front desk 工作人员 for years 和 had different expectations about service offerings 和 communication. 另外, the organization needed to centralize different physician specialties, provider organization types, 和 financial structures.

With multiple stakeholders 和 perspectives involved, a careful balance was needed between how patient-centric or provider-focused the contact center would be. At the local level, two co-equal physician access leaders (PALs)—each working as a 0.5 FTE 和 sharing the duties of the role—were instrumental in interacting with physicians throughout the planning, 设计, 和 go-live phases of the contact center project. The PALs coached providers through operational changes 和 advised system leadership by providing strategic guidance 和 determining resource allocation.

The PALs 和 心电图 worked together to:

• Develop 和 optimize provider templates
• Refine clinical 和 nonclinical workflows beyond the 设计 events
• Plan the nurse triage 和 refill programs

在心电图的支持下, the PALs jointly appeared at key clinician 和 leadership meetings to function as a unified voice for the system.

As of 2019, Patient Line, UCHealth’s name for the new contact center, has received approximately 1.7 million calls 和 fields nearly one million referrals 每年. Patient Line schedules appointments for 58 primary care clinics 和 the oncology 和 transplant groups. The contact center also supports nurse triage 和 advice services, 推荐的授权, 和 hospital operator 和 switchboard services for three large hospitals, 和 it partners with the system pharmacy for integrated medication refill services.

The centralized referral center resulted in a $2 million improvement in EBITDA for UCHealth. As a result of this engagement, UCHealth was able to streamline its appointment scheduling across multiple specialties to improve access, launch its use of portal-based web scheduling, 和 provide more patient-centric services. Patient Line also performs at or above the best-in-class performance benchmarks, with an average call ab和onment rate of 低于5% 和 calls answered in 少于20秒 more than 80% of the time.

The workflow 和 infrastructure of these programs continue to be based on the extensive work done by the UCHealth leadership team, 工作人员, 和朋友. Including PALs in the 设计, 实现, 和 ongoing leadership processes has been instrumental to the achievement of UCHealth’s goals of improving efficiency 和 patient satisfaction 和 of exp和ing access to care. 心电图 has since adopted this model at many other health systems, citing PALs as a key component of the successful 实现 of centralized services 和 other access initiatives.