Access delayed is care denied. Across the healthcare ecosystem, patients are waiting—often too long—for appointments, specialists, and answers. In the 2025 McKinsey Physician Survey,1 83 percent of surveyed physicians say that they’ve seen patients postpone care. Access barriers comprised three of the top five reasons, according to respondents.2 Each delay risks poorer outcomes, higher costs, and growing frustration for patients and clinicians.3
Care organizations globally recognize that improving patient access is both urgent and difficult. They have typically tried to solve the issue by asking doctors to be more productive and hiring more physicians. But amid ongoing physician shortages—projected to exceed 137,000 by 2037 in the United States alone4—asking physicians to “do more” in today’s environment risks exacerbating burnout and worsening access.
Organizations have also concentrated on reducing wasted care capacity by redesigning clinic-scheduling templates and reminding patients of their appointments to prevent no-shows. While reducing waste remains important to increasing access, it is table stakes and on its own falls short of meeting patients’ needs as demand rises and patient expectations evolve.
Hence, this article goes beyond waste reduction to outline three additional solutions that build on these efforts: reimagine care models to unlock capacity, incorporate patient preferences to catalyze adoption of the new care models, and expand capacity to scale sustainably.5 All four together represent a more innovative approach to ensuring patients get the right care, in the right place, at the right time. When implemented together and in the right sequence, these solutions can add three to seven percentage points of EBITDA margin while also improving satisfaction and retention for patients and clinicians alike, as well as health outcomes.6
Reimagine care delivery with expanded care teams and transformational care models
The first step to fixing the access challenge is to rethink how care teams and patient care models are structured: who delivers care, where, and at what acuity level.
Today’s patients increasingly have complex chronic needs, which are not met by traditional single-physician care models. Administrative burden and fragmented information further limit what any one physician can manage alone. In addition, success in reimagining care delivery has been challenged by the substantial investments required—both in technology and AI and in the time required for change management. For change to stick, detailed clarification and subsequent retraining of the daily responsibilities and workflows of each in-clinic and centralized role are needed. The payoff is stronger community health and better experiences for patients and clinicians.
To solve these challenges, focusing on two tactics is key: comprehensively defining care models and clinical teams, and boosting staffing and technological enablement.
Define care models and the clinical teams to deliver them
Physician-led teams must define the care models needed to deliver the right care, in the right place, at the right time. This begins with identifying patients’ baseline clinical needs to ensure they are routed appropriately as new issues arise, thereby ensuring that each visit delivers the greatest value. When visits are poorly prepared or misrouted—such as when required diagnostics are missing or when patients see a specialist unnecessarily—care is delayed not only for that patient but also for others waiting for similar services. Conservatively, 10 to 30 percent of a doctor’s schedule is spent on patient visits where care was either unnecessary or could have been managed more effectively, our research shows. And in our 2025 Physician Survey, respondents on average note that 42 percent of the time they spend on patient care could be delegated to other care team members,7 reallocating scarce physician time to the highest-value demands.
Often, patients can be seen by others on their physician’s care team without compromising quality, including advanced-practice clinicians (APCs) to address some clinical needs and community health workers to manage social challenges. While state licensure regulations define the boundaries of what is possible, more care is accessible when clinicians operate at the top of their license. For example, if APCs provide more pre- and post-op care, surgeons can increase operating time and thus expand total patient access to surgery.
Specialty co-management is another high-impact approach to ensure optimal value for each specialist visit. For example, patients with stable, uncomplicated hypertension can often be managed by their primary care provider (PCP) rather than a cardiologist. This frees cardiology capacity for patients with more acute or complex needs who benefit most from rapid specialty access.
Provide staffing and technology support
A patient’s care team should also comprise a range of professionals and technology to support clinicians’ administrative work. Physician respondents to the 2025 survey note spending 11 percent of their clinical time on charting and documentation,8 and the 2023 McKinsey Nursing Pulse Survey suggests that tech enablement could free about 20 percent of nurses’ time for direct patient care.9
High-potential use cases for centralization, automation, and tech enablement include AI scribes, in-basket management, medication refills, previsit planning, prior authorization, quality reporting, and referral management. Limiting take-home and nonpatient care activities can address burnout—reported by 35 percent of respondents in the 2025 physician survey10—which ensures clinicians are more engaged with meaningful work at the top of their license.
Address patients’ preferences on an individual basis
Care models translate into improved access only when patients receive care that’s tailored to their individual needs. Personalization is essential throughout the patient journey, and it starts with scheduling.
Yet a key challenge has been that traditional scheduling optimization, such as reminders, double-booking, and template optimization, has only gone so far. These tactics are largely supply-driven and static, offering limited flexibility as patient needs evolve and care teams expand. Next-generation tactics use a digital front door or omnichannel approach that includes personalizing patient engagement to meet both patients’ “felt” (as defined below) and clinical needs, and building an integration layer into the technology stack to hardwire patients’ preferences and new care models into the scheduling process and to ensure optimal use of existing capacity.
Segment patients based not only on clinical needs but also on consumer preferences
The most effective care models deliver superior outcomes and patient experience by integrating a patient’s clinical needs with their felt needs—consumer preferences, including behaviors, mindsets, and self-identity. Reminders, clinical recommendations, and administrative outreach can all be personalized through segmentation-driven algorithms and scripts (table). When engagement resonates with felt needs, care teams are more successful at guiding patients to the right care, in the right place, at the right time.
Considering clinical segments alongside consumer preferences helps shape personalized patient journeys.
| Patient characteristics | Patient A | Patient B |
|---|---|---|
| Clinical segment | Polychronic care | Primary care treatable |
| Presenting complaint | Patient has intermittent, mild chest discomfort, with normal electrocardiogram (ECG) in the primary care physician’s (PCP’s) office. | |
| History | Chronic conditions include type 2 diabetes with an A1c of 8.4%. Patient has unhealthy lifestyle that has created recovery challenges in the past. | Older but healthy patient with no cardiac risk factors, who addresses health needs as they come up, rather than letting them pile up. |
| Consumer segment | Constrained | Disconnected |
| Communication channel preference | Prefers text; needs clear, simple language; wants to connect with relevant specialty for specialty-specific questions. | Prefers phone calls; has not activated the patient portal and doesn’t plan to. |
| Personalized plan | Given chronic conditions, text to connect patient with cardiology registered nurses to triage urgency, and given medical history, offer a same-day in-person appointment with cardiology advanced-practice clinician (APC). | Call center offers 3 options: an e-consult between PCP and cardiology this week, a visit with cardiology APC in 1 month, or a visit with cardiology physician in 3 months. Virtual shared as a second option based on consumer preferences for in-person visits. |
When preferences diverge from clinical needs—for example, when a patient wants to see a specialist instead of a PCP or a physician instead of an APC or registered nurse (RN)—their expectations need to be addressed. The goal is not to restrict choice but to guide patients’ decisions with trust and transparency. One method is to include the patient’s doctor of choice in a first appointment to introduce the other care team members. Ultimately, patients must retain the right to schedule the care they prefer, even when it differs from what their clinical segment suggests.
Hardwire hyperpersonalized scheduling for sustained success
To deliver consistent, personalized experiences across touchpoints, clinical and consumer segments must be hardwired directly into operations. An integration layer can connect a single patient profile to their electronic health record (EHR) and all engagement channels (patient portal on provider website, et cetera). All patient-facing employees also need to be trained to deliver patient-centered, personalized messaging.
For example, when a patient schedules an appointment (whether online or by phone), the system can prioritize options based on individual needs and preferences. These capabilities should extend beyond physician visits to include imaging, labs, procedures, and other ancillary services, ensuring the entire patient journey is coordinated and efficient. As digital and AI-enabled scheduling tools are increasingly used, organizations must commit to monitoring for bias in routing outcomes and wait times to ensure equitable care.
Expand the capacity available for care
The methods to expand actual capacity can be grouped into two categories: people (clinicians and clinical staff) and spaces (physical sites and virtual settings).
Reimagining care delivery and personalizing scheduling workflows can expand access, but without capacity and demand planning, they risk amplifying existing constraints and inefficiencies. Because expanding capacity is both a capital- and people-intensive challenge, it may enhance net patient service revenue at the expense of operating margins if the other two solutions are not optimized first. And since expanding actual capacity is the most straightforward solution, many organizations mistakenly start their access expansion there.
To overcome these challenges, an organization’s strategic growth plan should address reimagined care models and the clinical and consumer needs of its current and target patient population. For example, organizations serving or targeting a high proportion of low-complexity patients who prefer digital engagement may prioritize virtual-care investments over new sites.
When new sites are needed, the exact workforce, build specifications, and locations should be carefully considered to address known capacity–demand mismatches. For example, a workforce plan that doubles or triples care capacity may require minimal new physicians and specialists, but at least a doubling of APC, nursing, care management, and technician roles.
Both synchronous (for example, video or audio telehealth) and asynchronous (for instance, provider-to-provider e-consults) virtual care can expand capacity. Physicians responding to the 2025 survey report seeing 18 percent more patients per hour through virtual care compared with in-person care.11 Delivering care through dedicated virtual sessions—conducted outside traditional exam rooms and scheduled in half- or full-day blocks that are distinct from in-person care—can also reduce capital requirements. When aligned to a patient’s clinical needs and consumer preferences, the convenience of a telehealth visit can further enhance patient satisfaction.
To improve patients’ access to care, it is critical to lower the barriers they face in their healthcare journey. Across the integrated approach described in this article, there are three requirements for success:
- input from the frontline care and operations teams
- senior leadership that champions and orchestrates strategic changes
- holistic application across the entire care delivery ecosystem and all four solutions
Improving access to healthcare is not a single initiative but a leadership agenda that integrates clinical, operational, digital, and workforce strategy. The aim is to hardwire new care models and personalize care delivery to patient preferences, enabling the right care, in the right place, and at the right time. Those that innovate their care models can ensure more patients receive the care they need and deserve, improve clinical outcomes, and help care teams find greater meaning and satisfaction in their work—advancing both purpose and performance across the organization.
