Improving Community Patient Access to Specialty Healthcare Services

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC) is the largest public hospital system in the country, serving 1.3 million patients annually. The Capstone team was asked to identify barriers to specialty care access for community-referred patients at select HHC facilities (Bellevue, Elmhurst, Kings, Lincoln, and Woodhull) and to develop an implementation plan for strategies to improve access. Phase I of the project focused on interviewing stakeholders at the participating hospitals, root cause analysis, data analysis, and literature review. Phase I ended with recommendations and strategies that could be implemented across facilities to better manage the specialty care access. Phase II included interviewing stakeholders at the participating hospitals for best practices associated with the recommended strategies and the prioritization of identified strategies with HHC leadership. The final product was a customized implementation plan for each participating facility to address specialty care access and the development of metrics to measure efficacy of the recommended strategies.