Improving After-Hours Patient Requests to Lift Provider Satisfaction

Established in 1982, Farragut Family Practice (FFP)—a division of Summit Medical Group—is an independent, four-physician office including a physician assistant and two nurse practitioners. FFP provides comprehensive well-visit care, occupational health assessments, and related services to the greater Knoxville area and surrounding communities.

Challenges

As part of Summit Medical Group, the providers at FFP share oncall duties with seven providers from three other practices within the group. Since every practice operates independently, office hours vary at each location, as do the holidays each office observes. 

FFP leadership identified the need for a more comprehensive, advanced answering service solution. The practice’s after-hours call service was error-prone and left little personal privacy for providers, relaying messages by texting the providers’ personal mobile devices. 

Both emergency and nonemergency calls between 4 and 5 PM were continuously misrouted to FFP providers. In addition to regular interruptions after hours, the providers had no way of masking their personal cell phone numbers when returning patient calls, which compromised their privacy.

Solution

Farragut Family Practice (FFP) selected PerfectServe Practice Communication to streamline after-hours call management, provider scheduling, and HIPAA-compliant messaging. Other key PerfectServe capabilities implemented include:

• Caller ID protection for providers
• Dynamic Intelligent Routing®
• Location independent accessibility

Implementation

PerfectServe facilitated the transferal of necessary information over from the previous service and simplified the logistics between the separate offices, ensuring the correct workflows were built and applied for each provider in line with FFP’s unique requirements.

Results

Increased Provider Satisfaction

Adoption took off once providers realized the app showed exactly who was on call and masked providers’ personal caller IDs when contacting patients. Providers with varying levels of experience with technology became proficient with the app very quickly.

Enhanced Practice Administration

PerfectServe simplified processes by allowing administrators to easily monitor after-hours activity and change the on-call schedule anytime from anywhere. Three other Summit sites implemented PerfectServe, which integrated call schedules across sites to simplify after-hours operations and eliminate routing errors.

Upgraded Call and Message Routing

Adding a dynamic system of rules and deliberate logic for call and message routing improved both the relevance of calls received and the response time of the providers.

Improved Patient Experience

FFP stopped receiving patient complaints about being treated impolitely, which happened frequently with the previous answering service.

Conclusion

By employing PerfectServe’s advanced, automated Answering Service solution, Farragut Family Practice improved their patient experience, practice operations, and provider satisfaction by eliminating call and message routing errors.