Frequently Asked Questions

PerfectServe is an integrated clinical communication and collaboration platform that features secure messaging—both text and voice—with our proprietary Dynamic Intelligent Routing® technology, which analyzes a range of variables to automatically identify and connect you with the correct care team member you need to reach at that moment in time. Our solution is proven to reduce communication cycle times and enable clinicians to speed time to treatment.

We’re so glad you asked! Communication and clinical workflows have long been our expertise, but our vision has evolved quite a bit over the years. For organizations looking to maximize their investment by working with one partner to address all communication and scheduling needs, PerfectServe Unite has it all. Unite is an end-to-end, cloud-based platform that encompasses all of our solution areas: Provider Scheduling, Call Center/Operator Console, Clinical Collaboration, Patient & Family Communication, and Practice Communication. As part of one integrated platform, these solutions improve patient care, enhance provider satisfaction, and give time back to nurses.

PerfectServe is more than just texting. Yes, our solution supports bidirectional messaging to improve communication between providers and care teams. But we go beyond secure messaging to make sure your messages get to the correct clinician for any given situation, even if you’re not sure exactly who that person is at the moment. PerfectServe can also auto-escalate messages that aren’t answered in a timely manner, meaning you don’t have to worry that your communications aren’t being received.

No. PerfectServe works on your legacy devices, smartphones (including both BYOD and shared device models), VoIP and landline phones, desktops, and even pagers. No proprietary devices are required.

It depends! As an integrated system of applications, PerfectServe is a platform that can be tailored to your organization’s unique clinical objectives. We build for your organization’s goals, so pricing is determined by the application modules you need and the size of your organization. Our consultants are happy to discuss pricing as we get a better idea of the size and scope of any potential deployment.

While there’s no such thing as a HIPAA-compliant app, PerfectServe is a comprehensive, secure platform that enables you to implement an effective HIPAA-compliant communication strategy across your organization.

a.    When using PerfectServe, all numbers are hidden. Personal information received from participating clinicians is protected.

b.    Physicians can take or make patient calls from any phone. As long as a physician returns or makes calls through the PerfectServe app, their privacy is maintained. Patients or other recipients see the physician’s office number instead of their personal cell phone number or home number. This capability also overcomes caller ID block.

PerfectServe purposefully built a platform that removes the hassle clinicians face every day when trying to connect with other care team members. It’s proven across 500+ hospitals and 30,000+ practices and post-acute care organizations. We seamlessly manage communication for close to 700,000 clinicians every day. Read what our customers have to say.

a.    PerfectServe differs from other secure messaging/clinical communication platforms with its proprietary Dynamic Intelligent Routing technology, which automatically identifies and provides immediate connection to the right care team member for any given clinical situation. With every communication that occurs, PerfectServe analyzes a combination of real-time situational variables to ensure that the communication is delivered to the right physician, nurse, or other care team member for the clinical situation at hand. This capability prevents clinicians from having to manually search for an intended recipient’s contact information, only to find out that they’ve called the wrong person.

b.    This advanced routing capability facilitates powerful communication-driven workflows and enables time-sensitive, collaborative care delivery. Our cloud-based architecture is the only platform purposefully designed to transcend geographic and organizational barriers to drive collaboration among all stakeholders and across all care settings. Our experienced technical and clinical consultants work closely with you to customize a solution that best meets your patient care workflow needs.

c.    PerfectServe provides patient-centered real-time identification and access to the patient’s active care team. Any care team member responsible for providing care to the patient at that moment in time is listed and can easily be contacted with a single click.

d.    PerfectServe has proven high-value integrations, including the ability to leverage the data in the EHR and other applications to ensure that the most up-to-date information is delivered to the right care team member who needs it at that particular time. Moreover, PerfectServe is able to integrate with legacy VoIP phone devices, optimizing this substantial investment by sending secure text messages—generated with a smart device or the web application—directly to the VoIP device. In this way, care team members can immediately be apprised of new messages when they’re moving around to provide care.

PerfectServe protects the time of physicians and other practitioners by ensuring they only receive relevant communications that require their action, and those communications are delivered according to their individual contact preferences. This means they’re not bombarded by erroneous and immaterial phone calls and messages from colleagues and care team members. Further, PerfectServe eliminates unnecessary interruptions and lost or delayed messages; facilitates more direct connection collaboration among physician colleagues and team-based care members; enables more efficient care coordination under alternate/episode-based (bundles, MACRA) payment models; and enhances the quality of care by enabling your physicians to accelerate time to treatment.

PerfectServe facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration across all care settings and among all care team members, including nurses. PerfectServe allows nurses to easily identify and immediately connect with the right person for any given clinical situation, meaning it’s just that much easier to get in touch with a doctor. By eliminating 1) the non-value-add activity associated with searching for whom to contact and how to do so, 2) extended wait times for returned pages/calls, and 3) errant calls to the wrong physician or other care team members, PerfectServe is able to ease the workload of the nurse and increase care team efficiency and productivity. Consequently, PerfectServe is proven to reduce communication cycle times resulting in fewer care delays, faster care response time, decreased patient wait time, enhanced patient experience, expedited patient transitions, and increased direct care time.

Only PerfectServe provides a single, secure, unified communication architecture that is purpose-built to transcend geographic and organizational barriers to drive collaboration across all stakeholders (including the patient) and across all care settings (including inpatient, outpatient and post-acute facilities). Only PerfectServe can 1) address more needs and problems across every area of care and stakeholder group while simplifying and standardizing communication applications, technologies, and vendors; 2) ensure high adoption to increase HIPAA compliance; 3) support a flexible mobile device strategy across any modality (e.g., secure text, voice call, voice message, pager, mobile app, and web app); and 4) deliver products as a hosted service without on-site hardware or software and the required maintenance that comes along with that orientation.

With PerfectServe, practice administrators can improve clinic workflows by streamlining calls from coordinating providers and facilities with 24/7 call management, eliminate answering services and associated errors that cause frustration among physicians, and ease the management of complex call schedules across multiple facilities. Administrators can easily access and change call schedules on the fly, expedite consults by allowing referring physicians easy access to practice staff, and set up any number of unique workflows that align with (and automate) the daily activities of their practice related to communication and care coordination.

PerfectServe uniquely provides communications management functionality for any size physician group or other ambulatory care setting. It supports 1) efficient management of all incoming communications, using Dynamic Intelligent Routing, from multiple affiliated facilities and organizations across multiple practice sites; 2) the ability to communicate with patients while maintaining caller ID privacy and overcoming caller ID block; 3) automated answering service functionality to eliminate lost and delayed messages while improving patient call response time; and 4) documentation of care coordination to increase reimbursement.

PerfectServe has two core escalation capabilities. First, notification escalation processes can notify the recipient of unacknowledged messages, and can be sent to multiple devices or end points simultaneously or in succession. Second, PerfectServe provides a backup escalation process to copy messages to other users if unacknowledged by previous recipients within a designated time frame. PerfectServe also has the ability to hold messages for future delivery—say, an after-hours call about a prescription refill that doesn’t need to be delivered immediately.

PerfectServe is able to expedite care team collaboration using the care team web application alone—device independent—or using the web and legacy VoIP devices. Since PerfectServe has the unique capability to integrate with legacy VoIP phone devices, notification with the secure message in its entirety can be delivered to these devices while the care team member is mobile providing care. PerfectServe does support greater nurse mobility for organizations that are ready to implement a mobile device strategy, but we’re always prepared to satisfy a customer’s current needs based on best practices without forcing a particular strategy.

a.    PerfectServe provides considerable flexibility for configuring and managing schedules. During implementation, all schedules are obtained from each practice and incorporated into the tailored Dynamic Intelligent Routing algorithm. This removes the need for any individual to find and refer to a schedule—wherever it may be kept—when attempting to identify the correct physician/practitioner to contact. Post implementation, when changes to schedules occur, PerfectServe provides an intuitive interface to allow office staff to quickly and easily make modifications. When a schedule is updated, that change is reflected immediately across the platform, meaning all care team staff have real-time access to the most current schedule.

b.    For organizations with more complex needs, PerfectServe’s Lightning Bolt scheduling solution is a powerful tool capable of auto-generating schedules for departments, groups, hospitals, and even health systems of any size. Lightning Bolt taps a mathematical process called combinatorial optimization to build balanced schedules that can account for any number of rules and preferences. Organizations using Lightning Bolt typically realize time and cost savings related to building and managing schedules, and more equitable schedules can also contribute to improved provider wellness and engagement.

c.    PerfectServe also supports integrations with more than 200 other clinical systems, including any third-party scheduling solutions an organization may already have in place.

Simply by requesting any desired reports, custom queries can be conducted by a dedicated account manager. PerfectServe is also able to include call schedule details in reports. Frequently requested reports include: Emergency Department (ED) Service Call, Hours On Call Activity, Hours on Call Summary, On-Call Schedule History, and PHI Filter Audit.

PerfectServe uniquely provides call management capabilities to more than 30,000 physician practices. Our Dynamic Intelligent Routing ensures that incoming calls and messages immediately reach the correct care team member, dramatically reducing patient wait time. We also provide the option for voice-to-text transcription. With this capability, practices are able to manage all communications with a single solution across multiple clinic sites and healthcare facilities while alleviating the costs of a human-centric answering service. Because PerfectServe can intelligently direct communications without human involvement, it’s prepared to help your patients on their care journey 24/7/365.

PerfectServe’s Professional Services team is committed to delivering a successful implementation fostered by a holistic approach based on PMI implementation standards. We have experienced technical and clinical consultants who work closely with you to understand your patient care workflow needs, including nurses who work in cooperation with clinical leaders to ensure the solution drives attainment of identified patient care initiatives, and technical experts who work directly with each customer to build personalized algorithms to accelerate and sustain high adoption and process improvement.

PerfectServe supports iOS and Android devices, including tablets. PerfectServe requires users to have, at a minimum, mobile devices running the most current version (N) or the prior version (N-1) of the mobile operating system. Please note that PerfectServe does not support Windows Mobile devices.

PerfectServe supports the most current versions of the following browsers: Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

While PerfectServe operators are not medically trained, they are trained to efficiently transcribe and relay critical patient information. All routing and workflow decisions are made prior to reaching the operators, ensuring consistent and accurate message delivery.

Absolutely! PerfectServe offers the option to patch critical calls directly to the on-call provider. This ensures immediate and direct communication when necessary.

The live operator service is an additional fee, but it is included in the flat monthly rate. PerfectServe’s pricing structure allows for transparent and predictable costs, with the live operator service adding an extra layer of communication support.

This is due to incorrect schedule and routing rules put in place by your organization or existing call service. It could be human error leading to misrouted calls, and the default is to forward a message to whatever number is available, whether that clinician is on-call or off-call. Thousands of medical practices have told us this before making the switch to PerfectServe.

With PerfectServe’s accurate call routing and forwarding based on physician schedules, only on-call providers should receive urgent calls, and non-urgent messages can be routed to the office to handle the next business day.