An option for improving access to outpatient general neurology

Creating a team of nurse practitioner/physician assistant providers with a supervising physician is one potential model to extend limited physician resources for those medical specialties such as neurology, whose outpatient access is suboptimal. We offered new patient appointments with the access team. Monthly lead time (time to third available appointment) revealed that overall new-patient access improved from an average time-to-appointment wait of 299 days down to 10 days. Patients completed an anonymous satisfaction survey about providers before and after the launch of the new access team; the results demonstrated preserved patient satisfaction with providers in this new team-based model.