Faculty Group Practice Newsletter

A Message from Dr. Vicente Resto, Chief Physician Executive and Senior Vice President for Health System Ambulatory Operations and Surgical Services

Dear colleagues,

As part of our continuing work to align our Faculty Group Practice and Clinical Enterprise, I wanted to share monthly metrics that we will distribute widely to the group practice. This Dashboard of Integrated Measures of Access (DIMA) places focus on metrics to help drive patient access in our primary care and specialty care ambulatory practice by ambulatory dyad. It takes into account several internally and externally benchmarked metrics, including:

• Median New Patient Lag: An industry standard of measuring new patient access. It is the median number of days a new patient takes from the day the appointment is scheduled to the actual appointment date. This is benchmarked with our target set to specialty specific or analogous academic medical center benchmarks provided by practices by Vizient, one of the nation’s leading healthcare performance improvement companies.
• Average Third Next Available: The average length of time in days between the day a patient makes a request for an appointment and the third next available appointment on the schedule, a measure defined by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. This not only takes into account requests for new patients, but also factors in the requests for established patients as well. The practice has an internally derived target of 14 days across all specialties.
• Median Completed Visits per Hour: Also set to Vizient benchmarks by specialty, the practice aims for the 75th percentile performance. This measure is the median of the number of completed visits a care provider (physician or APP) has per whole hour during their clinic sessions. This aims to be a measure of clinic efficiency, where practice dynamics of scheduling, no-shows, room turns, and clinic staffing each weigh into achieving this target.
• Slot Utilization: Measure of the actual percentage of appointment slots filled (scheduled, completed, no-show) compared to what was originally templated. This is measured against an internal target of 95% across the practice. 
• Department Productivity: This is measured as the percentile of the faculty wRVUs by academic department to their peers. This is benchmarked against each academic department’s chosen specialty (generally MGMA Academic, MGMA Physician, AAAP).
• Open Slots: Three columns show future facing data. For the next 14 days, the number of open slots, scheduled appointments and percentage of open slots for each ambulatory dyad is displayed. This is intended to provide a sense of the open and schedulable slots across the practice that influences access.
• Notes: This section provides shorthand context on the state of faculty and providers moving into, out of, and ramping up in practice.
  

The DIMA is intended to have a monthly cadence, to better tie in with monthly reporting and financials. It is also intended to supplement the current bi-weekly Ambulatory Scorecard that Ambulatory Medical Directors, Ambulatory Directors, Managers, and Supervisors receive. If you have questions regarding your or your clinics’ performance, please contact your Medical Director and/or Ambulatory Manager/Supervisor.

As we further develop this dashboard, we will begin to break out our practice into its large geographic areas, as each has its own access needs. These market areas include: Galveston, Bay Area (Clear Lake), Bay Area (League City), Friendswood/Alvin, Southern Brazoria, Texas City, and RWSP Clinics.