Sunny Peak Health System (a pseudonym) faced challenges meeting its care continuity access goals. Without a standardized approach for scheduling post-discharge care, patients struggled to secure timely appointments. Responsibility fell on individual physicians to squeeze these appointments into their already busy schedules. As a result, only 40% of patients received follow-up care within seven days post-discharge, increasing risk of readmission.

Sunny Peak Health System is a nonprofit healthcare system based in the southeast. They have six major medical centers with 6,800 employees and 2,600 active physicians. With over 900 beds, they treat approximately 20,000 patients in the hospital and serve about 275,000 individuals through outpatient locations.

Sunny Peak deployed a system-wide scheduling strategy to improve access to follow-up care, and they built post-discharge appointment slots into every provider’s schedule. To ensure success, Sunny Peak embedded schedule flexibility to avoid wasted capacity and reassigned scheduling to dedicated hospital staff.

By standardizing their approach to post-discharge visits, Sunny Peak saw 50% improvement in patients receiving follow-up care within seven days. Sunny Peak’s strategy to flip unused post-discharge slots also improved same-day access for other patients.