A patient feels the painful signs of a urinary tract infection. She visits her local health system’s website, searches “UTI,” and gets a list of OB/GYNs – all booked for three weeks.
What she doesn’t know: an urgent care clinic ten minutes away could see her today, and give the answers she needs. A virtual visit could see her in fifteen minutes. Because her health system’s booking tools aren’t built to surface those options, she assumes she’s out of luck – and books with a competitor instead.
This is the dilemma when health systems build a patient access strategy without all the right pieces in place, and the infrastructure to connect patients with the right care at the right place and time. The result is a puzzle that never gets solved. When you can’t match patient intent to your organization’s actual capacity, you aren’t navigating patients. You’re likely just giving them a list – with likely incomplete information – hoping they’ll choose wisely.
Modern systems can show patients where they fit in when searching for care, and guide them into place based on their situation with intelligent recommendations across locations and modalities, even if it’s not what they originally thought they needed or at the venue they started their search with. They’ll get seen sooner, and you’ll distribute cases to underserved areas in your system.
The problem with traditional patient access strategies
Patients with routine concerns don’t want the first name in a “find a doctor” search. They want the right provider, at the nearest location, with the shortest wait. Too often, that information is invisible – to patients and to health system leaders who can’t figure out why they’re losing market share.
The culprit is often your provider directory. According to a recent LexisNexis Risk Solutions report, 33% of directory users encounter incorrect or outdated information – errors that can persist for a year or longer. When your directory can’t reflect real credentials, services or capacity, you can’t guide patients anywhere useful. They wait. Or they leave. And you’re left wondering where all the net-new patients are going.
The other half is disjointed systems that don’t communicate with each other. Without a single source of truth, and routing logic that makes the connections in real-time – from all across the system and with current information – searching your system is a mess of pieces on a table. Patient expectations have evolved beyond this, and so has scheduling technology, and competitive systems are using the available tools to connect the dots for patients and light the way to best-fit appointments wherever they are searching from.
The missing piece: best-fit care
Best-fit care means intelligently matching a patient’s specific needs to your organization’s real-time resources. It goes beyond a static provider list by unifying and continuously updating provider data – then adding a layer of intelligence that closes the gap between what patients want and what you can actually offer.
The result is a two-sided value proposition.
For your health system, best-fit care:
- Right-sizes resources by making advanced practice providers (nurses, PAs, APPs) searchable and available
- Redirects routine care to lower-cost modalities, such as virtual care, when appropriate
- Protects primary care providers’ and specialists’ time for more complex cases
- Enhances margins by keeping patients in-network
- Improves capacity by filling open appointment slots, filling new providers’ schedules faster and reducing patient no-show rates
For patients, best-fit care:
- Reduces appointment wait times by surfacing providers across the system with the earliest slots
- Delivers convenience by suggesting options that are close to their home, or by delivering care at home virtually
- Eliminates dead ends that cause patients to pick up the phone and call a contact center
- Understands their needs, allowing them to search by symptom (“shortness of breath”) or test (“heart scan”) and find the correct clinical match
How to make best-fit care happen
It starts with a unified data foundation. Modern provider data management (PDM) systems connect search, routing and scheduling data across every channel where patients enter the system – so your organization can answer the questions that matter: Who’s available? What’s the best clinical fit? What’s most convenient?
Provider profiles become dynamic and actionable, with real-time context around locations, appointment types, modalities and availability. When a provider expands scope or a new service launches, the system adapts automatically. And when a patient searches “lung test,” the system doesn’t require clinical precision – it interprets intent and surfaces nearby imaging centers with CT capabilities, even if the directory calls it “computed tomography.”
AI continuously improves the picture. As patients search, schedule, and navigate care, AI-driven models detect patterns in language and behavior – and use those signals to sharpen how providers are described and matched over time.
Best-fit care in practice: Piedmont Healthcare
Piedmont Healthcare, a major southeastern health system, was struggling with scheduling dead ends that drove high abandonment rates. They replaced their traditional PDM tool with DexCare’s patient navigation and booking platform, and the results were immediate.
By infusing best-fit care into their access strategy, Piedmont:
- Converted 50% more patients into appointments through cross-sell booking flows
- Accommodated 31% more new patients
- Cut time-to-appointment by five full days
These results show what becomes possible when health systems make it easier for providers and patients to make the perfect match.
Ready to solve your patient access puzzle?
Building a patient access strategy without best-fit intelligence is like navigating with an old GPS. You’ll eventually reach your destination, but not as quickly or efficiently as you could – and you’ll likely lose significant business along the way. To get your patient navigation strategy back on course, take these three steps:
1. Identify the dead ends. Search for providers in your “find a doctor” tool and see what happens. Which providers and locations show up? Which are missing? Are scheduling options always available, and if not, why?
2. Test your search function using real words. Get into the mindset of patients and use language they’d use to search, such as “doctor for my kid” instead of “pediatrician.” Then take note of the results.
3. See what’s missing. Does a search for orthopedists miss the new clinic that opened six months ago? Are virtual care options showing up when you search?
If you don’t like what you find, it’s time to explore a better approach. Here’s how DexCare works.
