Spotlight on OSU Wexner Medical Center: Clarity is Everything

By Molly Siegel, MPH & Elizabeth Woodcock, DrPH, MBA, FACMPE, CPC

What happens when a health system stops treating access as a series of operational headaches and starts treating it as infrastructure?

At the Ohio State (OSU) University Wexner Medical Center, the hosts of our community’s 2026 symposium, that shift has already happened.

As access leaders from across the nation travel to Columbus next month to see OSU’s great work firsthand, we spotlight them in our just-released April podcast. OSU leaders share how they’ve moved from fragmented visibility to enterprise accountability. Their approach is not about adding more tools or layering on new processes. It is about clarity. Clarity in how access is defined. Clarity in what is expected. And clarity in how performance is measured and improved.

That clarity became the foundation for everything else.

Across the conversation, one theme stands out. Access improves when behavior changes. Not in theory, but in the day-to-day decisions made by schedulers, leaders, and clinicians. OSU has been intentional about identifying the behaviors that drive performance - and aligning incentives to reinforce them. The result is a system where accountability is not abstract. It is visible, shared, and actionable.

Just as important is how OSU has connected strategy to execution. Access is no longer owned by a single function. It is a coordinated effort that spans the contact center, capacity management, clinical leadership, information technology, and ambulatory operations teams. Each group plays a role, and each is working from the same playbook.

This is where many health systems struggle. The strategy exists, but it does not translate. At OSU, the opposite is true. The strategy is operationalized in a way that shows up in training, workflows, and outcomes.

There is no single “aha” moment in this work. Instead, it is the accumulation of aligned decisions, reinforced behaviors, and shared accountability. That is what makes it scalable – and sustainable. 

OSU Wexner Medical Center is not just advancing access within its own system. It is helping define what access leadership looks like.

Listen to the full conversation on the All Access Pass Podcast with our guests, Jamie Kern, MBA, Senior Director of Access and Capacity Management, Dr. Jonathan Parsons, Medical Director of Ambulatory Services and Executive Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs, Kristin Geiger, Associate Director, Patient Access, and Lois Bernhardt, DPT, MBA, Director of Capacity Management.

We look forward to seeing y’all in Columbus next month!