Hello, everyone and welcome to the episode of dash talk brought to you by relations I'm your host for today, Gabrielle, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Bryant Hoyle, who's VP of client services as strategic accounts at relation. And today we're going to be talking a little bit about her background as well as just ways that she's found success in creating a culture of patient access. So here to enlighten us on the subject, as well as provide actionable industry and industry insights is Bryant. So, Bryant, welcome back to you. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely so to start off, just tell us a little bit about your background. Bryant Yeah. So I have been in health care for over 30 years and I took a little bit of a winding path to get here. I won't take you through the whole history, but I'll tell you one story that I think is relevant and explains how I approach things. I started my career in engineering. I studied industrial engineering, looking at systems design and process improvement and how to improve quality. And usually that is like in manufacturing, like making widgets on an assembly line or maybe in logistics. But a large public hospital in downtown Atlanta where I live, was looking for help for someone to bring those skills to their emergency room. So they wanted someone to bring some order to the chaos in their emergency room. And so I worked with them for six months on thinking through the workflows, the parallel paths, like where are their bottlenecks, where there was contributing to wait times, how could we improve throughput and bring some consistency and better service in their emergency room? And so it was a great project. And I got really energized by how much opportunity there was in health care. So it made a shift very early in my career to focus on health care. And I've been taking that systems thinking approach to how I approach my work since then. And so since then I've worked in implementing electronic medical record systems, I've worked in consulting, strategic planning, but most recently I worked for a large, rapidly expanding health system, an integrated health system in the southeast, working as executive director for Central operations in the physician organization. So I was over that specialty scheduling, improvement of operations, driving visit volumes, reducing no shows, improving patient access. Also some other functions like clinical research, managed services. And it really was looking across our network of physicians employed affiliated partner groups to think about how could we work better as a system, how can we share patients through referrals, driving and network utilization? So anyway, that's been my focus for the past 10 years, but made the shift a few months ago to relation. Well, I'd love to hear about that shift to relations, so Thank you ship for sharing about your background. It's always so interesting to hear about people's past experience before transitioning into health care. It's just all of that experience really relates to the role you have now and just really helps you achieve in this area. So could you just tell us about that shift over to relation what you're doing now in your role? Yeah, so I came to relation I wanted to help a tech company solve a real pain point. So it was very intentional about my search to find a company that was solving true pain. And the pain that we were feeling was around specialty scheduling and honoring the preferences and the rules that needed to be in place when scheduling an appointment with a specialist, as well as getting visibility over schedules when you have a large base of physicians. So I work now with relations, VP of client services, working with our strategic accounts. So I work with our largest, most visible and most important accounts. Ascension and US Oncology are the two that I'm focused on right now and helping to make sure that we're the relation is helping them solve their goals. So what are their goals? As an organization, I work with my key stakeholders. What are their kpis, what have they promised to their board and how can we help them accomplish that? Because a lot of that is around growth and volumes and revenue and relationship. I want to make sure that relation and our tools that our teams are partnering with our clients to make them achieve their goals. So that's, that's what I'm working on now and it's a great role. I feel like I really can understand them because I was in their position before being here. Exactly and that's where that past experience comes in. Well, you know, often providers and patients, you know, they want different things. So how are you actually able to create a culture around patient access and satisfaction while also keeping providers and staff happy? I mean, that's quite the balance. So how are you able to create a culture like this? Yeah so, you know, I feel like patient access is a three way push and pull. You know, you've got the provider, physician or provider, you've got the practice manager and you've got the patient. So the provider and the physician typically want to grow their schedule as much as possible, but they have very specific boundaries around how they want their day to flow. You know, seeing certain patient types in the morning and others in the afternoon, and they really want control over their schedule. You've got a practice manager who wants to keep balance. They want to retain staff. Right I mean, especially right now, we've had such an exodus of people from the health care industry. So practice managers want to keep order in the house and make sure that there's some balance and consistency in their day and in the patients. They want appointments according to their schedule and when it's convenient for them, which may be first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening. And that's an opposite of what the providers and the practice managers want. So you've got this like perfect storm of competing priorities. And so balance is the key word is to figure out how can we make all these three parties somewhat happy with that, with the plan, and how do you structure your schedules to accomplish that? So it's a series of decisions that come into play. And the decisions are made by the first two parties, the practice and the provider and the patient's not at the table. So I think that. Organizations really need to intentionally create a culture where be where you remember the patient and create. And so that's what I talk about when I create. Creating a culture of patient access is creating a culture where you're thinking about the patient first and remembering their preferences as you make decisions and develop all of your programs around scheduling. Well, what would probably be your biggest piece of advice for health care leaders? You know, her trying to shift to a model like this that's a patient centered care model and also a culture. Yeah I mean, I would approach it like you approach any, any time you're trying to create. Trying to create culture. Right there's like a process of how do you drive culture? It's not easy. It's like changing your personality, right? So it's not something that happens easily. But I always would start with your mission and your vision. And if you want to create a culture around patient access, then patient access needs to be a part of that. And I'm seeing a lot of organizations put that in there to put in, you know, accessibility, every patient. These are key words I hear and vision and vision and mission statements that tell me they're focused on patient access. Sometimes they'll say timely care, sometimes they'll say hassle free care. Cedars-sinai recently came out with there's this broad and diverse Los Angeles community that that's what they want to serve. So that also tells me, you know, that they want to provide access to patients in a broad way. They want to focus their services to what works best for the patient. So that would be the first step, is just having that statement that clearly tells your employees and your patients what your priorities are. And then secondly, I think that organizations need to look internally and assess their culture. And that internal viewpoint could be looking at surveys, both patient survey results and employee surveys. Even Glassdoor can give you some insight into where priorities really lie and your culture. Then I think having conversations like back to my systems engineering hat, there's this term go to the gemba, which is going to the front line and talking to your front line employees that work with your patients, like your schedulers. You check in, check out people in your practices, front desk employees, and talk to them about their priorities in is patient. Preference really considered. And then looking at metrics, of course. I love that their next available metric is a great one to see how you're serving your patients and then identify barriers from where like, well, first of all, look at where you are versus where you want to be in. Identify any causes or barriers that may be preventing you from achieving that culture of patient access. So that could be policies or incentive plans. I mean, I see incentive plans. For employees that are sometimes misaligned. So if you want to do growth and expand with new patients, you need to be incenting your leaders and all the way down to your employees around growth in expansion, like maybe an incentive that looks at what's the total number of patients that we serve or how many new patients are we seeing in a year? Like specifically focus on that growth piece of it. And then I also think recruiting leaders that have an outside perspective and that are in alignment with serving your patient as a customer. And I'm seeing that a lot in health care and seeing leaders come in from hospitality, from airlines and hotel industries because they have the hospitality industry is so far ahead of the health care industry when it comes to the consumer experience. So I love that I'm seeing health care organizations bring in that expertise into their leadership. And then lastly, I would say constantly communicate like we know that's how you drive culture, communicate, communicate, verbal, written, graphical stories, all different ways to communicate that it's important to really change that culture and shift it towards. Well, let's bring this back over to relation because those are quite a few steps to kind of just understand and visualize at this culture that we're talking about. I mean, what initially attracted you to relation and also their culture? How did you feel like they're helping health systems and provider groups, you know, make these changes that you're talking about to create this patient access culture? Yeah well, I really love relations scheduling products, dash central and dash self. They really help you match your supply and your demand. So dash central allows you to take the rules and preferences around how your providers want to structure their schedule, and it allows them to achieve their goals around or organizing their schedule, but allows you to take a different approach with scheduling and open up your templates, which provides more flexibility for patients. So let me explain. A lot of health systems may create visit types that are very specific types of appointments that they want to see at certain times during the day. And that can be very limiting. So a patient that is a new patient, they may only have 8:00 AM every day is an option for them or a post-surgery consult. And of course, surgery post-op visit may only have the afternoons, and that doesn't work with their schedule. But the way dash central works, it allows you to take a different approach with your scheduling, and you can open it up to have more generic visit types, but then put in max rules and preferences to control that. You don't have too many difficult patient visits at certain times during the day. So it just allows you to take a different way of approaching how you schedule to serve your patients in a new way. And then control offer so many other things that are so highly configurable. I mean, you can it's really unlimited how you can configure it to work for you. You can prioritize certain providers that are new, that you want to grow their panel of patients. So you can if patients don't have a preference, you can steer them that way. There's tons of visibility into what's going on. The reports that you can look at allow you to see how your roles are blocking certain patients from getting access on your schedule. So it really I mean, I could go on and on with more examples, but it's dash control really changes the game. On how you can manage your schedule. And dash self allows you to offer self scheduling to your patients on the website or on an app. So it's a really way to bring in new patients. We know new patients how they find health systems as they go to the website, they check things out, they look at a few provider bios, and then they decide to schedule and allows you to meet patients where they are in that scheduling process. And everybody's operating from the same rules, whether they're calling to schedule an appointment or whether they're going on the website. You can make sure you have consistency and those rules across the different doorways into your system. So relations tools I think are completely unique. I haven't seen anything else like it on the market, especially when it comes to dash central, and I'm super excited to be bringing this to our clients. Well, of course, that sounds very exciting. So thank you so much for sharing with that brand. Are there any last thoughts before we start closing up the conversation here that you want to leave with our audience? I would just say that. It's really I love to see positions specifically focused on consumer experience, patient experience, on patient access. I'm starting to see more and more chief officer level and VP level positions focused on that. You really need to have that voice of the patient when you're making decisions. If you do not have that voice of the patient, when scheduling decisions are getting made, their voices tend to get left out. The perspective. Perspective is going to get left out. And it's just a really critical point to driving. And you also have to have the tools to enable it. So it's like you got to have the mission. You got to have the leaders that are driving it. And then you got to have the technology tools to operationalize it. All those components have to be there. But this is what patients are asking for. It's what they're demanding. And so if health systems aren't serving that up. They're going to miss out. So well, Thank you so much, Bryant, for giving us all the tools to set us up for success. That wraps up the conversation for today. So thank you for sharing all the way. You found success in creating a culture of patient access. It was a pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. And as always, if you want to learn more, please visit relations and look for this podcast. Wherever it is you get your podcasts. I've been your host, Gabrielle. Thanks for tuning in. It's
