WVU Hospitals team receives national recognition for improving care access
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – WVU Hospitals, which includes WVU Medicine J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital, Fairmont Medical Center, WVU Medicine Children’s, and their affiliated outpatient clinics, has received the Access Innovation Award from Patient Access Collaborative for its highly effective “No Show Initiative,” a forward-thinking strategy that significantly reduced missed appointments and expanded access to care across the system.
and Tosha Collins. Not pictured, Ele Rosier.
The initiative combined predictive analytics, targeted outreach, and policy enhancements to address a longstanding barrier to care. This improvement translated to meaningful real-world outcomes.
“By improving the current process, we were able to create the opportunity to see an additional 28,000 patients in 2024 This resulted in approximately $3.5 million of revenue — comparable to the workload of five full-time providers,” Darin Rogers, WVU Medicine vice president of provider and network services, said.
“The cumulative effect of a no-show policy implementation, a notification alerting patients to missed appointments, and our own predictive model was an overall decrease of 18.2 percent in missed appointments from 2023 to 2024.”
The predictive model developed for the initiative looks at numerous factors that calculate the likelihood of a patient failing to keep an appointment. If a patient is determined to be at risk of missing an upcoming visit, they receive an additional appointment reminder.
The impact was especially notable across University Health Associates (UHA) clinics.
“This initiative allowed our UHA clinics to maximize our appointment slots,” Rogers said. “It significantly enhanced our overall clinical access, volumes, and financial performance last year.”
The award-winning work was led by a cross-functional team comprised of members of Ambulatory and System IT Strategic Analytics, including:
- Erik Bebernes, senior business optimization strategist
- Jordan Berry, director of ambulatory clinical optimization
- Tosha Collins, director of contact center operations
- Ele Rosier, director of ambulatory clinical performance
Rogers emphasized the collaborative nature of the team’s success.
“This was exceptional work developed by members from the Ambulatory Operations and Information Technology teams,” he said. “I’m very proud of this team’s effort and thrilled to see them recognized at the 2025 Patient Access Collaborative Conference.”
Rogers also credited IT leaders Sean Loy, director of enterprise information technology, and Jackson Cramer, manager of enterprise information technology, for their critical roles in the development of new problem-solving approaches.
The Access Innovation Award celebrates solutions that are not only effective but also sustainable and scalable — qualities central to WVU Hospitals’ mission of delivering timely, patient-centered care. The No Show Initiative serves as a replicable model for health systems navigating similar access and operational challenges.
Patient Access Collaborative is a national organization supporting healthcare access leaders with tools, evidence-based strategies, and a robust peer network. Since 2011, it has brought together 128 of the nation’s top academic health systems, children’s hospitals, and cancer centers — representing nearly 4,000 leaders and more than one in four ambulatory encounters across the U.S.
To learn more about Patient Access Collaborative, go to PatientAccessCollaborative.net.
For more information about WVU Medicine, visit WVUMedicine.org.
For media inquiries: Tasha Pokrzywa, WVU Medicine Communications Specialist - [email protected]