Narcisse asks how H&H addresses specialty capacity constraints

So what are the steps you're taking for those to address the capacity constraint?

So a couple of things.

So in terms of specialty capacity, we have several workflows that we're working on now.

Number one is making sure that we have high quality e-consult for every specialty in every clinic.

What we're doing for that is we actually joined a national collaborative for e-consult.

So we've been able to learn the best practices from everybody across the country.

So we have the metric that we're trying to hit, which is we want one out of every five e-consults.

To be answered such that the patient doesn't need to be seen in the clinic.

We're getting close to that.

We know that's the right metric to hit because others have hit that metric and we're learning from them in this national collaborative that we've joined.

It's through the AAMC.

Other things that we're working on is on the workforce side, we're doing workforce planning to see where, I gave the example of neurology a minute ago,

but where people have left our system recently or where we know we're going to have gaps in the future, and very proactively with our hiring affiliates looking for people in those specialties, which oftentimes cycle along the lines of residencies.

So it's the easiest time to hire people in July because they just finished their residency or fellowship.

So we can plan ahead in that way with workforce planning.

Other things that we're doing are with some specialties, we're trying out direct access scheduling.

So you can actually schedule an appointment through my chart.

That's live in five areas today.

We also are looking at time release slots or optimizing templates.

So this is a little bit in the weeds, but you asked the question that has piqued my interest.

So one way that we learned in primary care, which we're now talking to our specialty councils to, is if you release an appointment a certain days ahead of when a patient would want to be seen, they're more likely to go to that appointment.

So it used to be in primary care, we'd schedule an appointment three months out, and then the no-show rate was very, very high.

It was more than 50% for new patients because nobody knows what they're going to be in three months.

So what we did is today, we're really learning from what we did with NYC Care as well, we time release appointments at 10 days.

So that's sort of the sweet spot of maximizing your chance you're actually going to go to that appointment and giving you the feeling that you're accessing care in a time frame that makes sense for you.

So now that we've done that and succeeded in primary care, we're doing that.

We're going to we're talking to our specialty colleagues about.

optimizing their templates as well.

Other things that we're doing to increase access, so I could keep going here, I'll just give one more example, is using the contact center in different ways.

So it used to be that you would, for a lot of specialty clinics, have to call yourself, wait on hold, and also there were appointment slots that weren't taken, so it was not an efficient way of doing things.

Having one protocol where our contact center is able to actually go into the templates and schedule appointments directly, we just started to do that for the first time in behavioral health a year ago.

I believe the statistic, I'll have to fact check this, but I'm pretty sure this is right, is we've unlocked 4,000 new appointments that wouldn't have existed before.

That's 4,000 New Yorkers that have behavioral health issues that wouldn't have been seen before if we hadn't been able to optimize our templates and have the contact center really increase our efficiency.

So I know I can keep going all day on this, so I'll conclude there and see if that answers your question.

Yeah, you did.