The New Healthcare Access Center
Improving Access to Care
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April 17, 2018
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A World‐class Health System Reinvents Patient Access
The Private Diagnostic Clinic (PDC) is the faculty practice plan at Duke University. The PDC has about 1,600 providers in over 70 ambulatory clinic locations conducting more than 3.5 million office visits.
Although the nearly 1,600 physician‐members provided excellent clinical care through the PDC, the clinical leadership was not satisfied with the experience patients and referring providers had trying to schedule timely appointments. Long hold times at appointment centers, high abandonment rates and scheduling‐related errors led to frequent complaints from patients and providers.
Providers recognized the need to find a way to improve patient access by redesigning the scheduling process in a way that would reduce costs, eliminate errors and meet changing consumer expectations for faster, more convenient access and service, including access through mobile devices and self-scheduling options.
FTI Consulting Role: Helping Chart the Solution
The PDC and Duke University Health System (DUHS) partnered with FTI Consulting to improve the PDC patient access model. At the start of the partnership, DUHS had 32 separately-managed appointment centers in eight different buildings staffed by nearly 200 employees using 15 unique organizational structures.
DUHS and FTI Consulting concluded that new centralized governance and management structures were needed to bring more consistency to scheduling workflows and processes and enable real‐time oversight.