All of us at UT Health Physicians have a shared vision to become the health care provider of choice in Central and South Texas. And because of your commitment to excellence, our practice has seen outstanding growth over the past few years. We are well on our way to fulfilling our vision.

Results of our Access Initiative

As you are aware, we have been challenged by not having enough available appointments to see all our patients within the timeframe they need or desire. Not only does this disappoint our patients, it places limitations on our ability to grow the practice. To address this dilemma, the Access Initiative and its task force was launched and led by Dr. Dan Johnson, Chair of the Department of Ophthalmology. 

The task force had a wide representation of many UT Health Physicians’ staff and providers. They studied the issue and implemented a series of recommendations which increased new patient visits by 23% by the end of 2018!  This was a truly remarkable accomplishment, but most impressive was that this was achieved not by adding more appointment slots to the schedules, but by ensuring that all appointments on provider schedules were filled!

Today, UT Health Physicians continues to grow. Because we are filling the available appointments on our providers’ schedules, current and future patients’ access to our services is decreasing once again. This decrease is happening at a time when more patients want to receive their health care from us!  We clearly need more capacity to serve the people who need us.

Phase II of the Access Initiative

The next phase of the Access Initiative will be to ensure schedules, clinical space and workflows are optimized so that we are making efficient use of our current resources. Dr. Bob Leverence, our Chief Medical Officer, and his team will be working with each clinical department and practice to assess their utilization of space and personnel. 

It is evident that UT Health Physicians will ultimately need more clinical space, more providers and more staff.  We are exploring new locations for practice sites and will recruit additional physicians who will spend the majority of their time seeing patients. We will also be launching telehealth activities to efficiently expand our reach and access.

Providing outstanding medical care in a coordinated, friendly, compassionate, patient-centered manner is how UT Health Physicians offers San Antonio and our surrounding communities a new level of health care.  The residents of these communities are becoming aware of the quality and value we bring and are seeking us out to be their health providers. They need our services and truly want to see our doctors and providers. We need to do everything we can to be there for them.