Coordination Is Infrastructure. You’re Treating It Like Overhead.
When a health system adds a surgeon, they budget for the OR time, the surgical tech, the anesthesiologist, the equipment. Nobody asks the surgeon to also handle their own pre op calls. But when patient volume grows across the organization, the coordination to support those patients is expected to absorb into the existing front desk. No new roles. No new systems. Just more volume into the same funnel. That’s not a staffing plan. That’s a hope.
The breakdowns show up in places you aren’t connecting to coordination. Rising denial rates. Increasing no show rates. Higher ED utilization for non emergent issues. CMS star rating pressure. Each of these has its own task force and its own improvement plan. But when you trace them to root cause, they converge on the same point: the steps between the clinical encounter and the patient’s next action aren’t being managed reliably at your current scale.
