Timely access to care is important to both health care organizations and patients. For organizations, it is imperative to maintain high customer satisfaction in order to retain their current patient base and attract new ones. It is important for patients because timely access to health services in certain specialities can reveal requirements for medical interventions and improve patient safety.
Providing accurate and informative measurement for this can be a crucial driver to make key decisions around staffing, space, and allotted clinical capacity for service type. What to measure and monitor can never be perfect with the amount of human elements in the equation, and there is the possibility of extensive amounts of data surrounding access. Armed with this information, we set out to develop a tool that can help accurately measure access across a service line or health system, and was simple enough to be used by all types of front-line service leaders.
Using some of the existing hospital’s EMR data structure (comprised of SQL, VBA, and Excel), we worked with service leaders to know what information is important for them to make accurate and strategic decisions. We scoped our measurement tool for new patients as it was deemed crucical for business and patient care. From there we looked at several key points in the referral process to determine what time and worked with service leaders to develop the following dashboard surrounding access.
Once our teams were armed with this information, process improvement measures became identifiable and service lines were able to target them for improvement, in turn reducing access to their service. Diagnostic tools and user guides were also distributed to the staff in order to aid them in identifying focus areas for improvement.
