Hartford HealthCare focuses on care outside the hospital

Many health systems are expanding ambulatory care options, but Hartford HealthCare has been doing it for some time.

Karen Goyette, executive vice president & chief strategy and transformation officer of Hartford HealthCare, says the Connecticut health system began focusing on providing more care outside the hospital more than a decade ago.

“It's really a journey we started about 15 years ago in the ambulatory setting,” she tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

“Long ago we had been following the data and the trends and listening to our physicians and what our consumers wanted, and to seek care closer to home,” Goyette says.

Hartford HealthCare aimed to create a comfortable environment closer to where patients live.

“It really started us on our journey of our ambulatory strategy, and not for growth's sake, but really to meet people where they are and really enhance their experience and our providers and our physicians' experience as well,” she says.

In a recent interview, Goyette discusses Hartford HealthCare’s shift to more ambulatory care, the expansion of urgent care, providing more virtual options, and the partnerships that are helping the system move forward.

• Read more: Hartford HealthCare aims to be most consumer-centric system

More outpatient options

Hartford HealthCare is now operating more than two dozen ambulatory surgery centers, and 43% of the system’s surgical volume is now handled outside of the hospital.

Goyette says patient preferences have helped drive the shift to providing more ambulatory care.

“We have many patient focus groups that we work with to constantly give us that feedback, so not only when we were building the strategy, but ongoing, they really give us the good, the bad, the ugly of how they feel,” she says.

Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, some patients expressed som fear of going into hospital campuses, and that has also spurred the acceleration of ambulatory care facilities, she says.

“It really gave us an opportunity to work with our patients to say, look, if this is not right for you to go to an acute care campus, we have this offering where it's lower cost, more accessible, and really offers you that patient experience that you're looking for,” she says.

Goyette credits Jeffrey Flaks, president and CEO of Hartford HealthCare, with setting the tone to pursue novel solutions.

“He really pushes the team to consider outside the norm, outside the comfort zone, and gives folks the runway to fail fast,” she says.

Expanding urgent care

Hartford HealthCare has been expanding its network of urgent care centers in recent years. The system now runs 50 urgent care centers across Connecticut.

The system has partnered with GoHealth Urgent Care to operate 40 urgent care centers, while 10 others are operated under the Hartford HealthCare brand.

Hartford and GoHealth are partnering to build an urgent care center outside of the system’s flagship hospital, Hartford Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut. Even with the presence of the tertiary care hospital, Goyette says there’s a need for more non-acute care services for patients.

“It's really a little bit of, unfortunately, a medical office desert outside of that acute care campus, which is nationally known. It's probably one of the busiest emergency departments in the country,” Goyette says.

She says the goal is to offer more services to patients who are showing up in the emergency room but don’t need that level of care. And she says the system wants to ensure urgent care isn’t only an option in the suburbs.

“It's helping with some of our community health equity involvement and really helping alleviate some of those demands in our emergency departments,” she says.

Hospitals are also bracing for the impact of Medicaid cuts in the coming years, and millions are expected to lose Medicaid coverage. Many healthcare leaders say they expect to see more uninsured patients in emergency rooms.

Hartford is hoping that its expanded network of urgent care centers can help alleviate crowding in emergency departments as Medicaid cuts unfold.

“I'm really proud of how we're positioned and not playing catch up in that regard. I do think we have some additional opportunities,” Goyette says.

The health system has launched HHC 24/7, which allows patients to connect with physicians for telehealth appointments around the clock. Hartford has also partnered with K Health on a “PatientGPT” AI platform where patients can get answers to questions about health concerns and then connect with doctors through HHC 24/7.

“All of that leads to lower cost care and potentially more avoidable readmissions, admissions, visits to the emergency department, which really, really lower the cost for everyone,” Goyette says.

• Read more: Hartford HealthCare wins 2025 Quest for Quality prize

‘You don’t need to own everything’

Much of the key to Hartford’s success has been in partnering with others, including GoHealth Urgent Care and K Health, Goyette says. With GoHealth,

She also points to Hartford’s partnership with CVS. Patients with many insurance plans accepted by Hartford HealthCare can get in-network adult primary care at CVS’s Connecticut MinuteClinic locations.

Goyette says the health system has embraced the idea of partnering with others who have specific capabilities.

“I'm so proud of my team's leadership in this space … how we've developed partnerships to really supercharge our ambulatory strategy,” Goyette says. “We're really big believers in that you don't need to own everything.”

“I think we're seeing a lot of companies come seek us out, a lot of innovation companies, because they know that we have that DNA to and flexibility to kind of run with it,” she adds.