Establishment of Pediatric Subspecialty Advanced Practice Provider Fellowship Training Programs to Optimize Advanced Practice Utilization in Pediatric Specialty Care and Facilitate Interprofessional Integration.

In the setting of demand for health care providers exceeding the supply of physicians, shift toward value-based care, and institutional gaps in the understanding of advanced practice provider (APP) scope of practice, one urban academic pediatric hospital developed 12-month subspecialty post-graduate fellowship programs for APPs in 18 subspecialties in an effort to optimize APP utilization at top of license and increase access to high-quality care. [J Contin Educ Nurs. 2022;53(11):478-480.].

Consumer-centric approach to enhance access to pediatric specialty care.

OBJECTIVES: Health systems must adapt to an increased consumer-centric environment to remain relevant in an ever-growing competitive health care landscape in which convenience is a key driver of patient satisfaction and loyalty. To adapt to this new environment, health systems must redesign processes to transform the delivery of ambulatory care and provide near real-time access to specialty care. STUDY DESIGN: A pediatric academic medical center in western Pennsylvania used a process-improvement approach to enhance timely access to specialty care and deliver a consumer-centric patient experience. METHODS: Critical factors in this process included engagement of key stakeholders, implementation of scheduling best practices, development of a set of scheduling guidelines, increased use of advanced practice providers, and use of data analytics to measure and benchmark performance. RESULTS: The time to schedule a new patient appointment decreased from 42 to 4 days and the patient satisfaction access domain increased by 57 percentile points. CONCLUSIONS: These factors should scale to other institutions, thereby enabling generalizable results.