Access to Outcomes

In the changing healthcare landscape, BJC will continue to work on improving the outcomes of our patients. Gaining a better understanding of our role in impacting social determinants of health will enable us to make additional advances in caring for our communities. The Access to Outcomes (A2O) initiative aims to foster effective, patient-centered, safe and accessible care for all people we serve.

With ED utilization as the lens for understanding access barriers, A2O is using mixed methods research approaches that combine quantitative and qualitative analyses to gain a deeper understanding of these barriers. It fosters efforts to include community members in co-creating potential interventions and solutions, plays a role in collective impact work through community partnerships, and also creates awareness of access challenges and identified areas of opportunity.

We used human-centered design in our process for selecting markets to pilot our A2O approach, which are: Barnes-Jewish Hospital, St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Christian Hospital, and Parkland Health Center. These four hospitals were selected because many of their patients don’t have a choice in where they will go to seek health services since there are a lot of other barriers that they face, which prevent them from having that choice. These patients may experience barriers such as poverty, transportation, and being uninsured.