Access Roundtable: What Leaders Must Rethink for 2026
Capacity constraints and reimbursement pressures are pushing health systems to question long-held assumptions about how access should be designed and delivered. In this Strategy Catalyst roundtable, leaders from Cleveland Clinic and Inova Health shared how their organizations are re-envisioning what "right level, right place, and right time" actually looks like in practice.
Building on their Access as a Strategic Product research series, Strategy Catalyst hosted a session in late February with leaders from Cleveland Clinic and Inova Health. Both leaders presented their organizations' access initiatives and discussed how they've worked to unlock capacity without adding headcount, get buy-in from skeptical providers and leadership, prove value when ROI is hard to quantify, and sustain momentum over time.
The conversation also explored how systems can leverage what they already have in place, how to persevere when access work takes years to build, and what's next on the horizon as reimbursement rules and patient expectations continue to shift. Attendees had the opportunity to ask questions and share their own access challenges with the panelists and peer leaders.
Click here to watch the Roundtable
Key Takeaways:
Start from existing capability, not aspirational architecture.
Cleveland Clinic scaled shared medical appointments to nearly 469,000 visits by standardizing a model already proven in small pockets — refining template integrity, visit types, and centralized routing before layering on self-service tools. Inova followed a parallel logic: strengthen foundational scheduling infrastructure first, then extend.
Prove value in layers.
Enterprise-level ROI rarely convinces the specialties that must change workflows. Both organizations built 'mini ROIs' — tying metrics to the specific friction each department cares about — to convert skeptics into adopters. The strategic case opens the door; the departmental case holds it open.
Sequence standardization conversations with precision.
Standardization triggers provider resistance when framed as mandate. Systems gaining traction approach it specialty by specialty, using direct patient feedback and utilization data to reframe control concerns as shared design problems. Executive sponsorship sets direction; provider-level engagement determines durability.
Access transformation is infrastructure work disguised as a strategy initiative.
Systems that sequence foundation before innovation — and prove value at every level of the organization — will outpace those chasing enterprise dashboards without departmental buy-in.