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In early 2023, Emory Healthcare faced mounting financial strain following a challenging Epic rollout the prior year. Under new executive leadership and increasing pressure, the system needed a transformational catalyst to restore both operational stability and patient confidence. The question posed by the C-suite—“What would it take to see every patient today or tomorrow?”—sparked the creation of Emory NOW, a three-month emergency sprint designed to radically improve access. The sprint’s success in proving organizational agility laid the groundwork for Emory Aspire, a long-term, three-year roadmap to embed sustainable, standardized access practices across the enterprise.
“There were implicit and explicit expectations that you had to participate. The rocket fuel for Emory NOW was the fact that we were close to being fiscally insolvent. Everyone found resolve to get through the sprint. What empowered and enabled us was this massive access structure we’d built over the decade—20 capacity management architects, fully staffed contact center. We had legion of people standing by to do the work.”
— SVP Enterprise Access
Overview
Emory started with “the Emory NOW promise,” for their access sprint, which included 4 components: to accommodate every patient seeking same-day or next-day care, ensure no one waits more than two months to be seen across their ambulatory setting, deliver care via both in-person and virtual options, and provide omnichannel access through phone, chat, and digital self-service. Over 300 physician, clinical, and operational leaders convened for an Alignment Summit align on current performance and to establish shared expectations and operational standards across divisions. Key standard expectations for physicians:
Implement Self-Scheduling and FastPass: Let patients book their own appointments online at convenient times and automate waitlists to better fill open time
Incorporate Same Day Scheduling: Shift to a culture where patients can schedule same day appointments
Align Capacity with Budget: Match expected clinic FTEs to available time in Epic; clinic session blocks should be 4 hours long.
Release Blocked and Private Time: Enable flexibility by releasing time previously blocked or reserved with sufficient lead time (i.e., 48 hours)
The sprint’s “pressure-cooker” design demonstrated Emory’s ability to move with urgency but also exposed that lasting change would require cultural alignment, sustained leadership engagement, and new care models.
From that realization came Emory Aspire, a three-year transformation plan emphasizing patient-centric and innovative redesign of care delivery models beyond scheduling optimization, coalition-building across specialties and sites, and data-driven decision-making to address variation. Strategic pillars are:
Standardization & Consistency: Establish unified scheduling practices, visit duration standards, and access protocols across all divisions.
Access Excellence: Optimize patient mix to align with market and national benchmarks to ensure strong growth.
Care Team Models: Refine and standardize care team roles and APP utilization to maximize clinical capacity and provider time.
Seamless Experience: Create an intuitive, consistent patient journey from scheduling through care delivery across all specialties.
Operational Efficiency: Optimize and simplify workflows and reduce administrative complexity to let providers and staff focus on patient care.
Time Frame
Emory NOW: March–June 2023 (three-month sprint).
Emory Aspire: 2024–2026 (three-year transformation).
Year 1: Foundation building
Standardize scheduling practices across all divisions
Implement technical solutions to support access
Establish transparent performance metrics
Year 2: Care Model Optimization
Scale successful models across the enterprise
Align incentives with access performance
Develop patient-centered navigation tools
Year 3: Excellence and Sustainability
All patients offered appointments within a week
Same-day care available for urgent needs
Sustainable workforce model
Pilot Scale
Emory Now launched in 4 phases across the Spring of 2023 with a cohort of 7 divisions kicking off every other week.
Goals and Competitive Advantage
Emory’s access transformation positions it to compete not only with regional community providers offering faster appointments, but also to strengthen its financial sustainability as Georgia’s leading academic medical center.
Three-year goal: All patients offered appointments across all specialties within a week and same-day care available for urgent needs by leveraging
Strategic recruitment
Patient repatriation
Optimized templates
Data-driven decisions
Results
Emory NOW:
800+ additional daily ambulatory arrivals while keeping clinical FTE neutral
674+ additional return patients seen daily
500+ additional daily imaging arrivals
700% increase in self-scheduling adoption
Financial stability maintained despite access investments
Demonstrated organizational agility and team resilience under unprecedented demand
Where results were slow:
Modest new patient growth: only 150 new patients seen daily
Same-day access inconsistency: only in 54% divisions
New patient mix challenges: only 3% improvement in new patients seen within 10 days
Level of Investment
Because of the depth of the internal talent pool, Emory had a very light investment. The organization contracted a small handful of contractors to swell decision tree builders given the constricted timeline
Lessons Learned
Crisis can change if the groundwork has been laid: Emory’s sprint succeeded not because of pressure alone, but because a decade of behind-the-scenes infrastructure-building made urgency actionable. When the system aggressively pivoted, it already had an army of access architects, contact center agents, and playbooks in place to absorb the heat and convert panic into performance.
Speed sparks change; structure sustains it: The Emory NOW sprint showcased extraordinary organizational agility, but access remained challenging due to physical capability constraints (perceived or real), resource bottlenecks, status quo resistance and cultural barriers, staffing challenges, and inconsistent application of standards. Sustainability required the foundations that Emory Aspire later built: standardization and templates, consistent expectations, and cultural reinforcement over time.
Clear expectations unlock resilience: When expectations were explicit and timelines concrete, teams rose to the challenge of adding hundreds of daily visits without additional staff. The experience proved that urgency can create transformation when there is clarity, shared purpose, visible leadership, and accountability.