Advaita Health reposted this
I didn't always think about access to care. When we started Green Hill Recovery by Advaita Health as a private-pay transitional living program, the honest truth was that there were more "high-end" treatment options than there were people seeking services. Too much of my time was spent traveling, marketing, and — I hate this word — competing for clients. We were trying to build a model program, but the business reality was that the bottleneck was demand, not capacity. That experience bummed me out. But it taught me something I didn't fully appreciate until later. When we shifted to commercial insurance and started building an outpatient platform, everything flipped. Suddenly, the question became: how fast can we actually get them in? Fast access isn't what gets me fired up. I care about clinical quality, provider development, and patient outcomes. But I've come to deeply appreciate that answering the phone quickly, getting back to prospective patients immediately, and scheduling them with a provider while they're still asking for help can be the single most important factor in whether someone actually gets better. The window of opportunity is often small. A person decides to reach out — maybe after months of thinking about it, maybe after a crisis, maybe because someone they love finally said something. And in that window, you've got to capitalize on motivation. If you don't, the moment passes. They may not ask for help again. As we've grown, access has become one of our most important operational priorities — not only because hospitals, employers, and insurance companies ask about it (they do), but because we've seen what happens when we get it right. And what happens when we don't. Some of what we've done over the last two years: In 2024, 20% of our new patients waited more than 30 days for their first appointment. Today, that number is 4%. We did that while growing new patient volume 53% year over year. 96% of new patients are now seen within 30 days across all service lines. But the numbers only tell part of the story. The harder work has been cultural — getting our admissions team to think about scheduling the way clinicians think about treatment. Not as an operational metric, but as the first clinical intervention. Because it is one. We're not done. We're building toward 48-hour access for most services, statewide virtual availability, and eventually a walk-in/virtual on-demand model. But the principle stays the same: the sacred thing in healthcare is the patient-provider relationship, and everything we build around access exists to get people into that relationship faster — not to replace it. Start measuring time-to-first-appointment now. You'll be surprised by what you find. Kudos to Ryan Jarrell and team! Advaita Health AIM: Advaita Integrated Medicine