19 FEBRUARY - 2023By Ann Blanchard, Director Patient Access and Capacity Management, Nebraska MedicineAs a Director of Patient Access and Capacity Management, Ann works closely with the clinical chairs and operational leaders throughout Nebraska Medicine's access innovations division that supports ambulatory care. Her role is to ensure that optimal patient access strategies are developed, implemented, and sustained to support seamless patient service across the care continuum. Spending many years in this field, she has successfully led access-focused initiatives that create and support exceptional access services, performance, value, and experience for their patients and provider.Could you please shed some light on how the access innovations division works?Within our access innovations division, we have three contact centers. First is the ambulatory contact center that schedules across our ambulatory enterprise. Second, we have the radiology contact center that schedules our radiology and imaging services. Lastly, our medical communication center is an answering service that provides 24*7 nurse triage support. Could you elaborate on the continuity of care you offer to the patient?Considering continuity of care as our top priority, we work to keep our patients connected with their providers. Especially for our primary care, where we have recognized and certified the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model. It keeps patients scheduled with their Primary Care Provider (PCP). For example, if a patient requests an acute appointment, our agents can use an algorithm to schedule it with the patient's PCP. In case PCPs are not available on the same day or within the timeframe based on the patient's acute need, we turn to our PCP's care team that we've built for each primary care practitioner. If they also don't have the availability, we look across the patient-centered medical home. By leveraging a feature called `auto search,' our agents can check the availability of the entire PCMH across all 14 of our clinic locations. If there is no availability under any branch, agents can look within the patient-centered medical home region. The agent can confirm the availability and get the patient in with that . We ensure a patient access-centric model of care, that helps the patient align with their PCP. We also have a chronic care management team that connects patients with their PCP for situations like chronic diseases. It's important to have continuity of care to support their health and wellness journey.What are the challenges you faced while getting patients to their PCPs? Patients having both acute and chronic situations simultaneously is the major challenge. Especially when it is a chronic disease, and it is acutely worsening. In that situation, PCP is our priority. But if they are unavailable, our agents have another option of annual wellness visits to get a patient schedule with their PCP . Again, suppose there is no availability as per the patient's needs matches the time when the annual appointment needs to be scheduled . In that case, we send a message to the clinic to make some adjustments and look for other available options. We ensure that annual wellness visits to the center are always coordinated with the patient's PCP.Have you seen any recent technological trends in the market lately during the post-pandemic?We implemented a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for our team during the pandemic time. The tool was Salesforce, and we leveraged it for various reasons. The main aim was to ensure that we provide a personalized patient experience and bring in all the information across our organization into that tool.Could you please elaborate more on your CRM platform?For us, CRM works best in improving the patient experience and allowing them to access our great providers across Nebraska healthcare institutions. We feel that our contact center teams, Delivering High-Quality Patient CareCXO INSIGHTSAnn Blanchard
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