This is Part 2 of a three-part series on the healthcare trilemma: rising patient demand, shrinking clinical capacity, and mounting financial pressure.
Your health system’s physicians are overwhelmed, and often the reason isn’t understaffing. It’s too many cases they shouldn’t be taking, stealing them from where their experience is needed.
Experts project a shortage of 86,000 physicians nationwide by 2036. Two in five physicians will reach retirement age within the next decade. And the pipeline of new physicians won’t keep pace. But those stats only tell part of the story.
Your health system’s capacity is also shrinking due to supply-and-demand mismatches. Whenever a highly trained clinician spends time on care that doesn’t meet their level of expertise, it wastes time, shrinks capacity, and harms downstream revenue.
This capacity problem is one pillar of the healthcare trilemma, a set of forces (surging demand, fewer clinicians, and mounting financial pressures) squeezing health systems from all sides. In part one of this series, we explored the rising demand. This time, we’ll reveal why capacity problems are actually patient routing problems hiding in plain sight.
Problem: Low-acuity care consumes high-acuity slots
Lower-acuity visits from patients with cold and flu symptoms, urinary tract infections, and rashes don’t require a physician’s expertise. But they do consume providers’ time. When this happens at scale, access bottlenecks get worse. Highly sought-after physicians are booked out for weeks and months.
And perception is reality. When patients see that your providers are at capacity, they’ll seek care from available doctors down the road.
The hard truth is that your health system probably does have enough clinical resources, including nurses, advanced practice providers, nearby clinics, and virtual care sites. But most health systems lack the ability to surface these providers to patients during online care journeys, making them invisible. All of which shrinks capacity even further.
Your ‘Find a Doctor’ tool isn’t the answer
It’s seldom the patient’s fault that they chose the wrong provider. One of the real barriers is outdated “find a doctor” search tools on hospital websites. Most are designed to funnel patients toward physicians by default — filling their calendars while other capacity sits unused.
Traditional provider search tools are also driven by complex decision trees that lead patients to dead ends, forcing them to pick up the phone or log in to a patient portal to make an appointment. These tools can’t understand the intent of a patient’s online search, nor connect them to the provider, modality, or location best suited to address their concern.
Care mismatches waste time and cost money
When systems search and scheduling tools default patients to physicians, care mismatches become routine, causing multiple downstream problems.
To understand why, consider what happens when a patient is directed to a PCP for symptoms of a sinus infection rather than a nearby clinic or virtual visit. The PCP spends 20 minutes on a visit that a nurse practitioner can and should handle. That time adds up; appointment backlogs now average 31 days and counting nationwide. Meanwhile, a 20-minute slot at a nearby clinic goes unfilled, resulting in revenue leakage.
Misaligned care frustrates patients
Patient experience matters, too. The 60 minutes that a patient spent driving to the PCP, sitting in the waiting room, and driving home could’ve been reduced to 10 minutes in a virtual care visit. And when patients receive more appropriate, convenient care that respects their schedule, they’re more likely to return to the health system for additional, higher-acuity services.
This is one area where virtual care remains valuable, delivering faster, appropriate access and serving as a strategic lever to expand capacity. When you know where your bottlenecks are, or where available capacity exists, you can start rerouting patients from overwhelmed clinics to online care.
Solution: Route patients to open capacity in real time
Most health systems can’t hire their way out of the capacity crisis. That’s why a smarter approach is to surface all your providers, clinics, and alternative care settings where patients can actually find them.
DexCare’s patient navigation platform makes all the options available at the point of search. When a patient types “strep throat” or “UTI symptoms” into a health system’s website search bar, the system recognizes these as conditions appropriate for APPs or nurses and shows available clinic and virtual slots.
The same logic applies when someone calls the contact center or searches on Google — APPs and alternative sites of care become clear, bookable options rather than a hidden offering buried inside a rigid “find a doctor” tool or a clunky digital front door.
Consolidate all your capacity data
DexCare integrates with EHR, CRM, ratings and reviews, and other systems, creating an intelligence layer that connects schedules, rules, and clinical preferences. Hospital COOs and other leaders get a dashboard-level view of their capacity, allowing them to shift demand to match available capacity.
When capacity data shows that a primary care physician is booked three weeks out but a nurse practitioner is available tomorrow, the system directs appropriate cases to a CRNP, filling an empty slot and protecting physicians’ schedules for patients who need them the most.
Added capacity yields strong downstream results
What can happen when a health system uses intelligent patient navigation to expand its existing capacity? Take a look at Providence, the largest healthcare provider in Washington state.
Using DexCare, the system captured 30% more net-new patients with the same providers, leading to an additional $7.8 million in downstream revenue. Providence also reworked its virtual care queue, allowing hybrid providers to handle 20% of the total workload, freeing up time for higher-skilled clinicians.
Save your providers time and solve the capacity crunch
With patient demand continuing to grow nationwide, health systems need to stretch provider capacity by any means possible. DexCare has helped physicians reclaim more than 34,000 hours of their time by helping patients navigate toward the right provider at the right time.
Request a demo and see how DexCare can help you expand what your providers can handle.
