Director of Access Optimization

The Director of Access Optimization will work as part of the Ambulatory Operations leadership team and report to the Executive Director of Ambulatory Operations. This critical role will provide enterprise-wide support of ambulatory patient access initiatives, focused on maximizing the availability of ambulatory care, decreasing patient timelines for care, and ensuring provider and clinical resources are optimized to meet patient needs. The Director will assume operational responsibility for the design and performance of access-related programs, namely provider and resource template design, referral management workflow, and consumer self-service workflows. This role will be expected to build collaborative relationships with Boston University Medical Group (BUMG) leaders and other hospital outpatient department areas to influence best practices, as well as matrix with IT for execution of Epic build efforts. This position will drive the ambulatory access KPIs around improving appointment lead times and maximizing the use of the Epic infrastructure to promote best practice access approaches.

POSITION SUMMARY:

The Director of Access Optimization will work as part of the Ambulatory Operations leadership team and report to the Executive Director of Ambulatory Operations. This critical role will provide enterprise-wide support of ambulatory patient access initiatives, focused on maximizing the availability of ambulatory care, decreasing patient timelines for care, and ensuring provider and clinical resources are optimized to meet patient needs. The Director will assume operational responsibility for the design and performance of access-related programs, namely provider and resource template design, referral management workflow, and consumer self-service workflows. This role will be expected to build collaborative relationships with Boston University Medical Group (BUMG) leaders and other hospital outpatient department areas to influence best practices, as well as matrix with IT for execution of Epic build efforts. This position will drive the ambulatory access KPIs around improving appointment lead times and maximizing the use of the Epic infrastructure to promote best practice access approaches.

Position: Director of Access Optimization        

Department: Clinical Documentation

Schedule: Full Time

Onsite: Boston, MA

ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES / DUTIES:

The Director’s responsibilities include:

• Articulates and executes on initiatives to improve ambulatory access operations, with a focus on capacity, scheduling, patient throughput, referral management, and patient digital self-service.
• Sponsors administrative aspects of the Enterprise Access Operating Model (i.e., access principles) ensuring translation of operating principles to workflows and ongoing monitoring.
• Designs and executes on access operational programs and advises on how to use Epic tools effectively to codify the design, including:
• Visit type strategy
• Schedule template optimization
• Guided scheduling approach (i.e., decision trees and scheduling questionnaires)
• Referral order optimization and enhanced referrals
• Work queue design
• Partners with BUMG and department leadership to educate on the access design and change processes. Effectively communicates the “why” of the change to physicians and team members at-large.
• Partners with the Patient Contact Center (centralized scheduling) to identify scheduling optimization opportunities and drive standards across the supported lines of business.
• Provides design of Epic application architecture to IT for system build; partners with IT to plan for the implementation of the build.
• Is accountable for periodic audits of resource and provider template design, and work queue volumes.
• Monitors key performance indicators related to availability of care and resource/provider optimization of clinical effort; advises QUMG and department program leadership to remediate non-performance to metric standards.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

(The above statements in this job description are intended to depict the general nature and level of work assigned to the employee(s) in this job. The above is not intended to represent an exhaustive list of accountable duties and responsibilities required)

JOB REQUIREMENTS

REQUIRED EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE:

Bachelor's degree in healthcare administration, business, or a related field; master’s degree preferred.

7-10 years of experience in healthcare with a minimum of five (5) years of managerial operations of a physician enterprise or shared services function supporting ambulatory operations.

Or equivalent combination of e