For decades, academic medical campuses have served as the gravitational center of clinical excellence. Yet healthcare dynamics are evolving. Patients now demand convenience and accessibility — even as they continue to respect the superior expertise academic medical institutions provide.
Campus settings excel at providing complex, multidisciplinary care. However, they can also present practical barriers for patients. Convenience and accessibility-related challenges such as extended travel requirements, limited parking, complicated navigation, long wait times and aging infrastructure are all pushing patients to seek outpatient alternatives.
Strategic, high-performance ambulatory care centers offer a compelling solution. They can extend your unique brand of academic excellence into community settings and eliminate traditional friction points while maintaining the clinical sophistication that defines your institution.
When thoughtfully designed and positioned, these facilities don’t just accommodate patient preferences — they actively expand your reach and strengthen your market position.
The future of healthcare is ambulatory
Healthcare delivery is tipping toward outpatient settings for a growing range of services. This progression reflects advances in clinical capabilities, evolving reimbursement models, and changing patient expectations, among other factors.
Consider the following data points:
- Patients overwhelmingly prefer healthcare that is both affordable and conveniently located. One 2023 study showed that patients rank cost and location as the top two most influential factors in selecting a healthcare provider.
- Ambulatory care meets these needs with convenient, easily accessible locations and lower out-of-pocket costs compared with hospitals and academic campuses.
- Over 50% of patients report combining healthcare visits with other stops (pharmacy, grocery store, etc.), highlighting the demand for care that fits into their normal routines.
- Outpatient procedure volumes are projected to grow by about 10% in the next five years, whereas inpatient volumes are expected to drop ~0.7% in the same period.
- As ambulatory care centers gain popularity, hospitals are losing surgical volumes.
- Over the last five years, the density of the US population has shifted to the suburbs, while in-office work across the country remains on average 36.3% lower than pre-pandemic levels (and seems to be stabilized near this point). Developing an ambulatory network that expands your patient base and increases your market share in these high-growth suburban locations should be a top-of-mind strategy.
Your institutions are rightfully recognized for your distinct areas of expertise and advanced clinical capabilities. However, as these powerful trends converge, academic centers must find new ways to meet patients where they are geographically and maintain their connection across the full spectrum of care.
Bridging excellence and accessibility with high-performance ambulatory care
High-performance ambulatory care centers allow you to address the pragmatic factors driving patient choice — while delivering the same high-caliber quality of care found on your main campus. With a thoughtful approach, you can integrate ambulatory and campus-based services to provide a seamless experience across the spectrum of care.
It is now possible for healthcare providers to deliver the full range of routine care — as well as a growing number of more complex diagnostics and procedures — in ambulatory settings. This broadening of outpatient capabilities gives patients more control over their individual healthcare journeys, including their preferred clinical settings. For many patients, convenient and cost-effective outpatient centers are now the default setting.
Even patients with complex conditions prefer convenience when possible. For instance, transplant patients with complicated medical needs may find campus visits burdensome for routine monitoring and follow-up care.
Integrating campus and ambulatory services for an improved patient experience
Academic institutions that recognize these trends can develop ambulatory centers that deliver the lion’s share of care while reserving campus visits for specialized interventions that can’t take place anywhere else.
Building an integrated network of ambulatory care and campus-based services allows you to deliver an outstanding experience for patients as their needs inevitably change over time. As patients move from your ambulatory settings to your main academic campus and back again, you can provide coordinated transitions — think of them as “warm hand-offs” — to appropriate resources.
This synchronized process ensures your patients receive the right care in the most appropriate settings. All without burdening patients with the need to reeducate providers about their history and current health objectives at each stop along the way.
Extending (and expanding) your institution’s brand through ambulatory care
Yet another benefit your patients will appreciate is the ability to access the promise and safety of your highly regarded brand in the modern outpatient settings they prefer.
By imbuing your outpatient offerings with all the weight and reassurance of your brand, you gain a key opportunity to differentiate your ambulatory care centers from the non-academic competition.
Patients at your ambulatory centers can rest easy knowing they are still receiving care from your highly regarded institution, backed by all the same experiential and clinical standards you stand for. They benefit from the same evidence-based protocols, specialized expertise, and comprehensive electronic health record systems that distinguish your flagship institution.
When you treat your ambulatory care offerings as an extension of your brand, you attract patients who are as committed to clinical excellence as they are to convenience.
Ambulatory design elements that enhance the academic patient experience
Thoughtfully designed ambulatory care centers actually extend your academic health system’s reputation for excellence while at the same time giving patients the streamlined, convenient healthcare experiences they seek.
Key design elements that support this objective include:
- Accessibility and convenience. A central location and ample parking go a long way toward meeting patients’ growing expectations for ease and convenience in accessing healthcare.
- Intuitive environments. Clear wayfinding, logical clinical adjacencies, and straightforward patient flow patterns create a welcoming experience that complements your institution’s clinical sophistication.
- Academic integration. Purpose-designed spaces support the same multidisciplinary collaboration that characterizes your campus-based care, ensuring patients benefit from coordinated expertise regardless of location.
- Clinical continuity. Careful attention to space planning ensures you are able to implement the same evidence-based protocols that define your institution.
- Advanced diagnostic capabilities. State-of-the-art imaging and laboratory services allow patients to benefit from your institution’s clinical protocols in an ambulatory setting, without unnecessary campus visits.
Embracing strategic ambulatory care development
For academic health systems seeking to expand their patient base while maintaining their distinctive academic identity, strategic ambulatory development offers a compelling approach.
The most effective initiatives share several characteristics. They:
- Begin with a comprehensive analysis to identify optimal locations and service configurations that complement and expand on campus capabilities
- Incorporate design elements that meet patient expectations while supporting the distinct requirements of academic practice (such as multidisciplinary collaboration)
- Maintain seamless integration with the academic medical center’s clinical and technological infrastructure
- Support educational and research functions while enhancing the patient experience
The future belongs to institutions that thoughtfully bridge the best of academic medicine with the accessibility and experiential features patients want. These forward-thinking organizations will burnish their reputations by extending their excellence beyond campus boundaries, ensuring more patients benefit in the process.