Article
Improving patient access to healthcare: 6 practical solutions
Nov. 1, 2025 · Authored by Aaron Adams
Your healthcare system needs innovative and efficient solutions to address pressures across tightening margins and resources.
But this push toward operational efficiency can come with perceived tradeoffs: Often the area that gets squeezed the most in challenging environments is access—worsening an already major problem for healthcare executives.
As leaders address access impacts, they’re often making an expensive error by looking outward rather than in.
This comes down to the build-versus-buy argument: On one hand, organizations can buy more capacity by adding staff, clinic space, and other expansions. But buying capacity is costly and less sustainable, especially given the many financial unknowns in this current reimbursement and economic climate.
On the other hand, leaders can make better use of previously bought capacity by being more strategic about their existing internal infrastructure. This is the more sustainable option, especially when it’s done in a way that prioritizes worker wellbeing.
Your healthcare system needs innovative and efficient solutions to address pressures across tightening margins and resources.
Breaking Down the Build-vs-Buy Debate: Factors to Consider
While buying capacity to address access may seem easier, it’s much more challenging in the long run. And it might not be as successful as building capacity by optimizing current investments.
One reason is cost.
Buying and leasing new space, recruiting more physicians, and other capacity-adding changes involve capital-intensive decisions, and the benefits of those investments are often not fully realized.
Finding physicians, space, and resources can be hard. It creates a lot of lead time and complexity in a business at a time when everybody in healthcare is looking to dramatically reduce cost structures, not add to them.
That’s assuming, of course, that buying capacity is a realistic option at all. It may not be. It comes down to the sustainability of ongoing hiring, onboarding, and other forms of resource-gathering. Healthcare staffing projections through 2040 show a shortage of up to millions of people.
Beyond costs and sustainability, a third factor that should persuade leaders to build instead of buy is worker wellbeing. The notion that you can have either happy workers or better access isn’t true.
What is true is that access and morale aren’t at odds with each other; improve one and you actually improve the other.
Case in point: patient frustration. Frontline clinicians have sounded the alarm for years about combative, hostile, and even violently active patients. If better access addresses those issues even in small ways, morale could dramatically improve.
6 Best Practices to Address Access
Access improvements come gradually, but some fixes do involve lower-hanging fruit. A strong strategy can target a mix of both outcomes—long-term, hard-fought gains coupled with easy, morale-boosting wins. Consider these six best practices.
1. Define success
What does success look like in the context of financial growth, population health, patient experience, and other outcomes?
Organizations already do this assessment, of course. But thinking about success with humility and candor and, where possible, a more aggressive stance on goals that are just good enough.
People are fighting to get back to the mean, but can your business really succeed if your target is being average? Be honest about what your business really needs to succeed, and consider higher expectations, striving for the top quartile or decile.
2. Strengthen change management
Any kind of workflow change, whether a new process or new technology, is going to cause chaos if stakeholder input isn’t considered.
But often that’s the very move healthcare organizations make when hurried: They shortcut change management, glossing it over for seemingly bigger priorities.
Instead, leaders should build a more complete and logical case when campaigning for a change. Part of that plea will certainly involve cost. But it will also cover other things, like patient impact such as fewer combative patients, maybe, or fewer late-stage disease progressions.
All of these components can help create a stronger rationale for workflow transitions.
Half the battle should be in getting buy-in and confidence that the work can be better and more efficient with less burnout, better productivity, and improved patient outcomes. But you have to have great communication.
This approach could have positive effects in other ways. It could help restore trust, especially between clinicians and administrators. Letting other people in to help you do work you’ve always done yourself requires trust. Consider the why in that change management plea, because it could be supporting that trust.
3. Be honest about progress
Many healthcare organizations have improvement teams who’ve been focused on access for years and yet still struggle to show meaningful progress.
Some of those challenges come from tough questions going unasked, such as, “Is what we’re doing really working?”
Organizations need to be honest with themselves about how effective their improvement efforts have been to date and whether they’re on the trajectory they need to be to reach the success they’ve already defined for themselves.
If you’ve only seen marginal improvements, there may be some shuffling that needs to happen to get on the right track. That could involve many including the right partners or reprioritizing access initiatives.
It starts with honestly evaluating what’s working and what’s not.
4. Create evidence-based capacity plans
Much of the demand for healthcare services is predictable— right down to the emergency department. And yet, capacity doesn’t often reflect predictable metrics, creating misalignment between supply and demand. This presents an opportunity for healthcare leaders to rethink their approach with evidence-based capacity planning.
Most organizations understand who trying to serve, so it makes sense to build a schedule relative to the demand of that population.
When you focus on demand, then you can turn your sights to supply.
5. Go from batch work to work-in-flow
Many clinical workflows operate from a batched-work model, where clinicians do their administrative work in chunks—often set for a single admin day of the week.
This work can include everything from in-basket messaging and test result reporting to orders, requests, or documentation. But this model can hurt more than it helps. It’s hard for clinicians to remember details when tasks like chart notes aren’t done during or immediately after visits.
There are also patient impacts. People get upset when their messages go unanswered, and outcomes could be affected if critical tasks like refill requests aren’t fulfilled promptly.
If you’re a provider with a four-day clinical schedule and you take a day for administrative care, you’ve just lost 25% of your capacity right out of the gate. But if you instead reorganize the work with some basic process engineering and do a little bit of administrative work between every patient visit, clinicians can end the day without a pile of charts to close or an in-basket full of messages, or a load of test results and orders.
6. Explore unused EHR functions
Electronic health records have multiple functions built into their platforms that could help healthcare facilities operationalize workflows in more automated ways.
The problem is that many users of those platforms don’t turn them on. Because these tools already exist in these systems, the costs of implementation may be low for relatively high benefit potential.
Automation is underutilized in healthcare right now, and this really is an opportunity to get somewhere meaningful with it, right away.
These tools can allow patients to schedule online, self-arrive, or complete questions digitally. Some patients look for digital accessibility when choosing where to go for care.
Build Your Way to Better Access
As healthcare organizations struggle under the weight of financial and resource pressures, access is often the first thing compromised. Not because anyone wants that, but because it’s an understood tradeoff in the current environment.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Organizations can address pain points without squeezing access, but they need to look inward to do it. Building capacity by optimizing existing infrastructure rather than buying labor and leases is the cost-effective, sustainable, and morale improving choice.
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