Patient Access Is Having a Moment

The “access” in “patient access” is different than the third leg of the Access-Cost-Quality healthcare stool people have been trying to balance since the dawn of modern medicine.

It’s not “Access” with a capital A. It’s lowercase “patient access,” like getting in to see your doctor, scheduling a medical test, viewing your medical record and finding out how much you owe the hospital before it pawns you off to a debt collection agency.

If you’ve tried to do any of these routine buyer-seller transactions during the past 20 years, you know how increasingly hard they are to do.

I first wrote about the topic in 2021 in, “Patient Stories from the Front Lines Tell of a Healthcare Capacity Problem.” In that piece, I described the plight of three people I know who were struggling to see a physician for their respective maladies. I followed up with my own patient story in 2022 with, “Health System Capacity Problems Hit Home,” when I described my attempt to schedule an appointment with an allergist. Earlier this month, I wrote about my travails to get an appointment with a dermatologist in, “A Relatively Short Anecdote About Patient Leakage.”

What I didn’t know when I started writing about this three years ago was that I was writing about patient access. As Dave Davies of The Kinks famously said, “It wasn’t called heavy metal when I invented it.”

Regardless of who invented patient access, it’s having a moment right now. Every hospital, health system and medical practice is talking about it. Every hospital, health system and medical practice is trying to fix it. Every health services researcher wants a grant to study it.

The question is why?

A new report from Accenture has a clue: patient loyalty. Strong access, strong loyalty. Weak access, weak loyalty. The report is based on a survey of more than 8,000 U.S. consumers age 18 or older. Here are the key results:

• 89% of the respondents said the reason they switched or stopped seeing their previous provider was “ease of navigation.” A distant second at 44% was “clinical experience/expertise.”
• 70% of the respondents cited “access” as the most important factor in picking a new provider. That included convenient location and hours and the ability to get an appointment quickly. Last on the list of drivers was “reputation/brand.”

The Accenture survey results echo the results of Rock Health’s Ninth Annual Consumer Adoption of Digital Health Survey released in March. The Rock Health report also is based on a survey of more than 8,000 U.S. adults age 18 or older. Asked why they chose a virtual care option over an in-person visit for care, the top two reasons were “greater convenience” at 39% and “shorter wait time” at 30%.

Consumers are forcing healthcare provider executives to take patient access seriously. I’m sure the execs’ own market research shows that consumers will walk into the arms of another provider if they can’t get what they want quickly. That is, if they’re not walking already. Assertive healthcare consumers are now a competitive threat.

That’s great, although it should irk consumers that no one cared how long they waited to see a medical specialist until poor patient access threatened their bottom lines.

Thanks for reading.