From Burgers to Breakthroughs—Houston Methodist’s Flavorful Access Transformation
By Molly Siegel, Senior Associate, Patient Access Collaborative
When Houston Methodist set out to reimagine access, they didn’t just implement a few tweaks—they built a burger. That’s the metaphor Kola Ogunrinde, Director, System Access & Capacity Management and Referral Management Center, brought to life in a dynamic presentation with her colleague, Erica Simon, Director, System Patient Access & Specialty Scheduling. The dynamic access leader duo framed the system’s transformation journey as a layered, deliberate build. Just like a flavorful burger needs a solid foundation, innovative toppings, and the perfect bun, Houston Methodist’s access strategy is constructed around a base of standardized operations, topped with digital innovation, and wrapped in a culture of experimentation and excellence.
The Base: Centralized System Access
Before 2022, Houston Methodist’s scheduling landscape was fragmented: schedulers sat in individual clinics, managing in-person traffic while juggling calls. The result? Long lag times, limited reach, with no ability to level-load patient demand. Recognizing that access equals quality, Houston Methodist constructed a system-wide access department in 2022. What began with 120 FTEs solely focused on primary care and basic referral management has ballooned to over 450 staff supporting the front door to primary care, specialty care, and imaging, as well as system-wide referrals.
Access now flows through four specialized access centers—Primary Care Group, Specialty Care Group, Central Imaging, and a Referral Management Center—each wrapped in dedicated support teams for training, quality, workforce management, and optimization. This centralized structure created consistency, enabled scalable performance metrics, and unlocked a pathway to innovation.
The Ingredients: Digital Convenience, AI, and Decision Trees
With structure in place, the team went full speed into digital expansion. Online scheduling has surged across the board: 59% of same-day clinic visits, 51% of screening mammograms, and 45% of new primary care appointments are now booked online. Specialty care saw a jump from just 7% in 2022 to 19% in 2025.
Decision trees play a vital role, streamlining scheduling across 13 specialties and multiple diagnostic areas. By 2027, the goal is to embed decision trees in every specialty—and not just for agents. Houston Methodist has pushed this decision logic directly onto its public-facing website, enabling patients to schedule the right visit with the right provider at the right time.
And that’s not all. Ticket scheduling, where patients receive automated texts prompting them to self-schedule, now accounts for up to 40% of ambulatory referrals and 25% of imaging orders. These changes improve access while preserving capacity.
The Secret Sauce: Automation, Analytics, and Agility
Houston Methodist’s boldest moves involve automation. Outbound calls for imaging and specialty referrals—once entirely manual—are now bot-driven. Confirmations, reschedules, and cancellations? Automated. Quality assurance reviews? Performed by language models trained to detect first-call resolution and coachable moments across 100% of calls.
By year-end, the team expects to automate 10 million calls—equivalent to 273 agents’ worth of volume.
All of this is tracked by a dedicated analytics team. From access dashboards to lead time reports and performance benchmarking, data is the heartbeat of Methodist’s strategy. Despite surging demand, they’ve reduced new patient lead time from 17 to 15 calendar days in the past 18 months.
The Top Bun: A Future with One Front Door
Houston Methodist’s ultimate vision is a single front door: one phone number, one access center, one referral center. With tech-enabled agents able to resolve nearly any scheduling need on the first call, Houston Methodist is building toward seamless, omnichannel access.
As they continue to optimize convenience, bridge silos, and refine capacity, their burger is still cooking—but it’s already packed with flavor.
Houston Methodist’s Senior Vice President of Access, Tesha Montgomery, was the featured guest on the June edition of the All-Access Pass podcast. Join the conversation here.