Five months after its launch, the new YM Coordination, Appointment, Referral & Engagement (CARE) Center appears to be making significant progress toward its ultimate goal—providing patients with simple, supportive, and coordinated access to our world-renowned physicians.
The CARE Center provides ambulatory patients and referring providers with a single point of entry, through which they are directed to specialty-specific staff. Those staff members assist callers with such services as ambulatory appointment scheduling, referral management, care coordination, nurse triage, and transition of care planning.
Since the CARE Center opened at the end of January, CARE Center staff have responded to more than 120,000 phone calls, and metrics from these past months reveal significant performance improvement. The rate of abandoned phone calls has been cut by more than half, and the time to reach a live agent is already well ahead of industry standards. Of the now approximately 3,500 daily calls to the center, 80% reach a live agent in less than 30 seconds.
Referrals are being worked with greater efficiency, as reflected by the number in queue and the time to schedule—both down dramatically as compared to pre-integration. And as the first cadre of nurses have joined the CARE Center, post-discharge transitions of care planning has been introduced, a newly added service that has been extremely well-received by patients.
The CARE Center is located in newly renovated space at 25 Science Park, and features expanded hours of operation from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Phase 1 Completed
One-third of the Yale Medicine practice has now been integrated into the YM CARE Center, marking the completion of Phase 1 of this ambitious initiative. Planning for Phase 2 will begin in the fall, with the first Phase 2 department going live in January 2020. A third phase will follow, integrating the entire practice into the CARE Center over the next two years.
The departments and sections that have been integrated into the CARE Center to date are: Nephrology, Diabetes, Metabolic Bone, Orthopaedics, Pediatric medical and surgical specialties, Urology, Neurology, and Ophthalmology.
Positive Early Feedback
As with every new venture, there have been learnings, but physician leaders of the Phase 1 departments/sections state that the CARE Center has already enhanced the patient experience and created efficiencies for clinical faculty and staff.
“So, far, we’ve been very pleased,” says Silvio Inzucchi, MD, director of the YM Diabetes Center. “The CARE Center is doing a fabulous job for us—our patients are happy with the quick response and our practitioners and staff are thrilled with the support they are getting.”
Among the many benefits of the CARE Center are a new, more reliable phone system, and brand new facilities for CARE Center employees, notes Gary Desir, MD, chair of Internal Medicine and co-chair of the steering committee that has been overseeing the CARE Center project. When Dr. Desir visited the CARE Center recently, he was struck by the “great spirit” and enthusiasm of center staff.
Clifford W. Bogue, MD, chair of the Department of Pediatrics, says “Staff are extremely professional and a pleasure to work with, and the CARE Center is well organized — which has yielded positive early results for our department.”
Making the vision of improved patient access a reality involved collaboration and hard work among numerous partners from throughout Yale Medicine, Yale New Haven Health, and Yale University.
“We set out to create a better way for our patients to reach and engage with us—to ease their journey and enhance their experience,” says YM Chief Operating Officer Maryam Saeri. “In the process, we began a culture shift, introducing new and innovative ways of working together, creating partnerships that did not previously exist. We invested in new technologies and learned to better leverage existing ones. Our patients are already noticing; their response validates our assumptions and inspires us to continue."