Timely appointments are critical to our patients’ wellness, but they are not the only ones who benefit when we provide care when and where it’s needed. Streamlined scheduling also helps our practice fulfill its goal of being the health care provider of choice for Central and South Texas with a focus on patient-centered care. Increasing access and simplifying scheduling supports our business model, grows our practice and allows us to hire more providers, open more locations and ultimately help more people.
UT Health Physicians has practice-wide access goals which are:
65 percent of primary care patients receiving an appointment within 7 days, 65 percent of patients needing specialty care receiving appointments within 14 days, an average of 95 percent slot utilization for all practices at all locations
UT Health Physicians' access initiative has been hard at work to streamline scheduling and help our patients get the appointments they need, when they need them. Since its launch in October 2017, the Practice-to-Practice (P2P) scheduling program has been an integral part of the access initiative. Following the early success of the P2P pilot program at the primary care practice in the Medical Arts & Research Center, the program was quickly rolled out to every primary care practice location. In just six months, the P2P program has helped hundreds of our patients stay healthy. Each primary care practice is able to schedule appointments with 15 of our specialty practices before the patient leaves their office. The 15 specialty practices include: allergy, cardiology, dermatology, diabetes, endocrinology, ENT, gastroenterology, infectious disease, nephrology, Ob/Gyn, ophthalmology/optometry, orthopaedics, surgery – colorectal, general, plastics, vascular, and urology)
A record 420 internal P2P specialty referrals were received from our primary care practices. This process improves patient compliance and continuum of care by relieving the patient of the responsibility of scheduling their own specialty appointments. It also decreases the total number of patients in our referral work queues, and allows practice operations to have a more accurate view of availability at each practice location.
Looking forward, the access team is planning to expand P2P scheduling and allow our specialty practices to schedule directly with our primary care practices. Every patient benefits from having a primary care physician and care team that serves as their medical home. By enabling specialty offices to schedule patients who need a primary care physician directly with one of our primary care locations, we will actively be helping more of our patients stay as healthy as possible.
For questions about the P2P program, contact Jeanette Hernandez, Director of Practice Operations, 210-450-9004.
