Chapel Hill, N.C.-based UNC Health Faculty Physicians, the clinical practice group of UNC School of Medicine, has spent much of the past year rebuilding its access model, and the group saw about 8,000 more new patient visits than projected as a result.
“If I were to look back on this year, I would have said this would have been a huge stretch goal for us,” Amir Barzin, DO, the physician group’s president, said during a recent episode of Becker’s Clinical Leadership Podcast. “But it’s the amazing work of an incredible team.”
Dr. Barzin stepped into his role as President of UNC Health Faculty Physicians in July and also serves as COO of UNC Health Physicians, the health system’s broader physician enterprise.
While growing the physician workforce was part of the equation, the group deliberately avoided treating headcount as the primary lever to increase access, according to Dr. Barzin. The starting point was restructuring the enterprise’s scheduling and access infrastructure.
“We said, Let’s start fresh and rebuild it the way that we would want to try to see it,” Dr. Barzin said.
That shift meant building a common access center with visibility across the system rather than leaving each department to manage its own scheduling in isolation. In primary care, for example, a patient calling a clinic with a scheduling delay can now be routed to a nearby clinic with more availability or connected to the system’s virtual care team while they wait for their preferred appointment.
Dr. Barzin credited Ashley Arey, vice president of care access at UNC Health, with driving a review of scheduling templates across specialty care departments to make sure clinics had enough new-patient slots and were using them efficiently. The group also leaned on Epic’s FastPass scheduling tool to keep those slots filled as they opened up.
Dr. Barzin said the group also expects AI tools, including a digital summary tool clinicians use to review complex referral records, to help reduce physician burden and further support access as adoption grows. But he framed the 8,000-patient visit gain primarily as an operational and cultural shift that leveraged existing technology .
“That’s 8,000 more patients that started in our system that really needed care at a quaternary medical center with a specialist,” he said. “It was a huge win for us this past year.”
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