Patient demand drives the business case for ambulatory expansion, yet faculty physicians often remain firmly anchored to your main campus. This disconnect creates a fundamental challenge: How do you meet modern patient expectations while fostering support and enthusiasm among the academic providers who deliver your distinctive brand of care?
The reality is that healthcare delivery is rapidly and predictably shifting toward outpatient settings. This progression reflects not only advances in clinical capabilities and evolving reimbursement models, but also fundamental changes in patient preferences.
Today’s patients prioritize convenience and accessibility alongside clinical excellence. They seek care that integrates smoothly into their daily lives — close to home, with minimal wait times and lower out-of-pocket costs. As U.S. populations funnel away from urban centers and into suburban and exurban communities, the demand for accessible, in-community ambulatory care will only continue to grow.
For academic health systems, this shift represents a strategic imperative: Meet patients where they are with high-performance ambulatory care options or risk losing patient volumes to competitors who do. Extending your highly regarded institutional presence through ambulatory care centers allows you to serve patients across the full spectrum of care needs while maintaining their connection to your brand and clinical programs.
Anticipating faculty resistance to ambulatory care
It’s clear why ambulatory expansion is compelling from patient and system perspectives. But academic providers often express reservations about going off-campus. Understanding your faculty’s legitimate concerns is vital to helping them see the very real benefits of practicing in an extended ambulatory network.
Faculty providers generally prize their connection to campus and have traditionally centered their work on campus grounds for several reasons:
- Mission integration: Faculty providers typically divide their professional time across clinical care, teaching, and research. Many maintain robust research agendas, seeing patients as few as two half-days per week (compared to the eight or nine half-days typical in private practice). Campus settings facilitate frictionless transitions between clinical, research, and teaching responsibilities.
- Colleague access: The on-campus concentration of subspecialty expertise enables immediate consultation and collaboration.
- Resource proximity: Specialized equipment and diagnostic capabilities seem more readily available.
- Academic identity: Faculty physicians often associate their professional identity with the campus environment.
From your faculty’s perspective, the prospect of practicing in ambulatory settings raises serious questions about maintaining academic excellence and mission fulfillment — questions you must be prepared to answer in order to gain their buy-in.
How can faculty providers benefit from practicing in ambulatory settings?
Skepticism around the shift to ambulatory care is understandable. However, strategically designed ambulatory care centers offer significant advantages for your faculty providers. In fact, ambulatory care can actually enhance academic mission fulfillment while addressing common pain points that contribute to faculty burnout and turnover.
1. Expanded research opportunities
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, population centers are shifting from urban centers toward the suburban and exurban fringes. In fact, exurban communities are now among the fastest growing places in the country.
Because ambulatory settings tend to be embedded outside of urban centers, they often provide access to more diverse patient populations across various demographics, ages, and socioeconomic profiles. This diversity strengthens research cohorts and accelerates enrollment targets, which is particularly valuable for studies requiring varied population representation.
Strategic ambulatory care center design can actively support research goals by streamlining patient recruitment and protocol implementation using integrated digital technologies.
In short, establishing ambulatory clinics in surrounding communities can significantly expand your faculty’s reach in recruiting research participants while at the same time meeting patients where they are and reducing their burden in the process.
2. Purpose-built teaching environments
As healthcare delivery continues to trend toward outpatient settings, there is significant value in exposing students to ambulatory environments. Doing so potentially provides more relevant training for future practice.
High-performing ambulatory care centers intentionally incorporate thoughtful elements that support teaching, surpassing what’s often available in aging campus infrastructure:
- Optimized exam rooms: Spaces configured specifically to accommodate students and trainees, with appropriate dimensions for observation and participation.
- Private teaming areas: Dedicated spaces where faculty can discuss cases with learners without compromising patient confidentiality.
- Technology integration: Appropriate space for the latest medical technologies as well as digital tools that enhance educational demonstrations and documentation.
3. Improved efficiency and work-life balance
Faculty providers face mounting pressures, from documentation requirements to administrative tasks that often consume evenings and weekends. Well-designed ambulatory centers increase efficiency in ways that actually reduce burnout-driving factors:
- Integrated care delivery: Purpose-designed clinical spaces that bring multidisciplinary teams together in close proximity, enhancing collaboration and reducing time spent coordinating care across dispersed locations.
- Point-of-care documentation: Workflow technologies that enable providers to complete documentation during patient visits rather than after hours.
- Streamlined processes: Intuitive patient flow and operational systems that eliminate common inefficiencies and allow providers to complete tasks with less effort.
- Reduced patient frustration: When patients experience convenient parking, clear wayfinding, and minimal wait times, encounters take on a more positive tone.
Improvements like these allow faculty to maintain rigorous academic standards while achieving better work-life balance — thus addressing a primary driver of physician burnout and turnover.
4. Cohesive campus connection
Technology integration in modern ambulatory care centers means faculty can maintain continuous connection with campus resources. That includes:
- Virtual consultations: Teleconferencing capabilities enable immediate access to campus-based subspecialist colleagues when needed.
- Integrated information systems: Holistic medical record integration ensures complete information availability regardless of care location.
- Research coordination: Digital tools connect ambulatory patients with appropriate campus-based studies and specialized diagnostics.
These connections ensure faculty can access the full array of your academic medical center’s resources while practicing in more convenient, efficient settings.
Engage faculty providers in a consultative approach to ambulatory design
Creating ambulatory environments that truly resonate with faculty physicians requires a consultative approach that begins with understanding your institution’s unique mission and culture.
At NexCore, we always start by listening when we develop ambulatory care centers for academic providers. What aspects of campus practice do they value most? What defines excellence within their institution? How do they envision integrating research and teaching in community settings?
Insights like these, complemented by ambulatory-specific expertise, should drive your approach.
Forward-thinking institutions incorporate flexibility into ambulatory design, acknowledging that outpatient capabilities will continue to expand. As procedures migrate from inpatient to outpatient settings, adaptable spaces ensure your faculty can deliver innovative care without facility limitations.
Extend your brand of academic excellence
High-performance ambulatory care centers represent an opportunity to extend your institution’s academic excellence into community settings. At the same time, they offer meaningful mission-advancing benefits to faculty providers.
By thoughtfully addressing faculty concerns and incorporating design elements that support multifaceted academic missions, you can create an ambulatory environment where faculty physicians thrive professionally while serving patients in the settings in which they now prefer to receive care.
The academic health systems that successfully navigate this transition will secure strategic advantages in patient access, faculty recruitment and retention, and market position for decades to come.