Nebraska Medicine

Ann Blanchard

As a Director of Patient Access and Capacity Management, Ann works closely with the clinical chairs and operational leaders throughout Nebraska Medicine’s access innovations division that supports ambulatory care. Her role is to ensure that optimal patient access strategies are developed, implemented, and sustained to support seamless patient service across the care continuum. Spending many years in this field, she has successfully led access-focused initiatives that create and support exceptional access services, performance, value, and experience for their patients and provider.

Could you elaborate on the continuity of care you offer to patients?

Continuity of care is out top most priority. We have a recognized and certified Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model that helps us connect patients with their Primary Care Provider (PCP). For example, if a patient requests an acute appointment, our agents can use an algorithm to schedule it with the patient’s PCP. In case PCPs are not available on the same day or within the timeframe based on the patient’s acute need, we turn to our PCP’s care team that we’ve built for each primary care practitioner. By leveraging a feature called ‘auto search,’ our agents can check the availability of the entire PCMH across all 14 of our clinic locations. If there is no availability under any branch, agents can look within the patient-centered medical home region.

We also have a chronic care management team that connects patients with their PCP for situations like chronic diseases.

We believe it is important to have continuity of care to support our patients’ health and wellness journey.

Have you seen any recent technological trends in the market post-pandemic? How have you leveraged it?

I believe it is important to use technology to improve the patient experience and operational workflows, as well as their effectiveness and efficiency whenever possible. We implemented a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool for our team during the pandemic. The tool was Salesforce, and we leveraged it for various reasons. The agent can access the patient card, which gives a 360-degree view of the patient information—their name, date of birth, address, and medical histories. The most important thing is that it helps agents determine the patient’s language and take the conversation forward. We have some refugees who speak different languages around Nebraska centers. Hence, it’s important to ensure that we follow our diversity and inclusion supported standards while uplifting all patients.

"I believe it’s important to use technology to improve the patient experience and operational workflows, as well as their effectiveness and efficiency whenever possible"

Another element of leveraging CRM tools is the ‘knowledge article’ we have created. It allows us to provide all information that the agent needs for every single specialty that we support. Additionally, the knowledge articles give very specific in-basket functionality. We also have a nurse triage facility that allows us to give the highest degree of care for each patient’s need and customization for each specialty.

Having 14 clinics across different locations sometimes becomes challenging for new patients. That’s why we have a way-finder to guide patients on how they can reach the clinic. Our marketing and communications team sends an email to patient that includes step-by-step directions and a hyperlink that takes them directly to Google maps for the clinic they are looking for. Then we have patient portal reminder that helps patients reaching the best pharmacy for refill medication. During the pandemic many patients stated they couldn’t refill medication as their prescriptions were post-dated or out of range and patients had to make an updated visit with the provider. As a result, the drugs from our Epic department may now be found in our CRM tool. The reason that we have this is our agents non-medical and inexperienced. They do not have access to those medication refills, screens, or information. Having it on Salesforce allows our team to have better understanding and a clear conversation with the patient about medicines they need. Then, they send an in-basket message to that clinical team to proceed with the same request. This tool has been innovative in the space over the past years as it saves at workflow and process of least one to two nurses.

From a population health standpoint, we’ve partnered with the primary care and population health teams to provide information on health maintenance topics. We feel that every interaction with our patients is an opportunity to intervene. Our agents use a pre-prepared script to talk to the patient about their health and get them scheduled. If the patient requests that the procedure be performed outside our organization, the agents will gather a few details and transmit them to our population health team. To be noted in the permanent medical record and close the healthcare gaps that are part of our value-based contract. Overall, leveraging CRM has been a great success for us. It allows us to have detailed patient information and communication with our clinicians while ensuring that all areas of our relationship are data-driven.

Any piece of advice for the upcoming professionals in this field?

I would suggest three key points for young professionals to succeed: clarity, alignment, and focus. They should have clarity about their objectives and strive for constant progress to align the entire team with those goals that help them achieve high performance. That also goes hand in hand with focus. It is vitally important to have them focused on their mission and vision. For us, our mission is to lead the world in transforming patient access through premier services, extraordinary patient care, collaboration, and innovation. All these elements are extremely valuable to succeeding in patient access and exceeding in healthcare.