News Releases
PerfectServe Launches Industry’s First Web-Based Physician On-Call Management
Tool
February 10, 2003
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Physicians and practice managers seeking a more accurate and reliable alternative to physician answering, messaging and paging services now have the industry’s first, Web-based on-call management tool at their disposal.
“PerfectServe OnCall™,” the new personal physician call management and messaging solution from PerfectServe®, Inc., gives doctors complete access and control over their professional communications using any telephone, Internet-enabled PC or wireless device. The company offers PerfectServe OnCall to physicians nationwide as a secure, robust solution to the administrative headaches and liability exposure of managing urgent physician communications, messaging and on-call scheduling.
“While the industry has poured billions of dollars into clinical and other healthcare information systems, PerfectServe is the first to develop a solution specific to the broken processes common to urgent physician communications,” says Terrell Edwards, PerfectServe chief executive officer. “PerfectServe fixes the recurring lack of accuracy, reliability and increased risks associated with conventional answering, messaging and paging services.”
“The control our doctors have using PerfectServe is unprecedented,” says Pat Webb, practice administrator of For Women, Inc., an obstetrics and gynecology practice in Cincinnati. “Each one can choose how and where to handle calls — all the time. And they can change the protocol as often as they wish.”
Point-and-click solutions to everyday administrative challenges
One of the key components of PerfectServe OnCall is its Web-based on-call schedule management tool, which saves hours of time and frustration in managing physicians’ on-call rotations. Until now, there was no foolproof way to uniformly create, update and distribute schedule revisions and physician contact preferences.
The PerfectServe OnCall schedule builder reduces repetitive, time-intensive on-call schedule creation tasks to minutes instead of hours. Schedule changes can be made from any Web browser or telephone and each change immediately and automatically modifies the call flow process.
Edwards has seen on-call schedules recorded on everything from the back of cocktail napkins to cobbled-together Excel spreadsheets.
“Problems arise when there is a deviation in the schedule, which inevitably happens,” says Edwards, “and physicians, nurses and answering service operators struggle to quickly find out who’s on call at any given point in time and how and where they should be contacted.”
Manual on-call scheduling and after-hours call answering are rife with liability exposure for physicians. Conventional answering services and hospital switchboard operators must make split-second decisions using written instructions for complex call handling rules and protocols. And while the instructions may be computerized, they are nothing more than “electronic sticky notes” that do not address the root problem — a lack of proper tools to manage complex routing, notification and escalation processes.
“With the current state of medical answering, messaging and paging, the only thing you can be sure of is failure,” says Edwards. “Human-centric processes always result in the ball getting dropped and potentially life-threatening and high-liability patient care communications lapses occurring.”
Because PerfectServe OnCall uses a practice-specific rules engine to determine where and how calls should be handled, changes made by the physician practice through the Web or over the phone are immediately reflected in the call flow process for a given practice, thus eliminating human error.
How physicians access their on-call schedule and other PerfectServe OnCall features
Upon signing into the Web, physicians can see who is currently on call, who is up next and their next time on call. They can make a schedule change, manage messages voice, email and fax messages, modify contact preferences.
Integrated messaging is 100 percent HIPAA-compliant
Voice, email and fax messaging are cornerstone capabilities of PerfectServe OnCall. When deployed within a given practice or community, the solution offers the industry’s first private, secure and auditable network for physicians to access and share clinical information among each other; and for hospitals to communicate lab, radiology, pathology and other patient care information to their physicians.
“Emailing patient information between popular Internet email services such as AOL or MSN, for example, is not HIPAA-compliant and exposes physicians to tremendous liability risk,” Edwards explains.
“We eliminate this risk because PerfectServe’s entire urgent messaging and notification infrastructure is hosted in a secure data center built on healthcare IT best practices and industry-standard network services and applications.”
About PerfectServe, Inc.
The PerfectServe physician-contact network automatically routes calls and messages to the right doctor, at the right time, in the precise way each physician wishes to be reached. Communication occurs faster, with greater efficiency and safety, because PerfectServe assembles and maintains the entire communications workflow and contact preferences for every medical staff physician, for every moment of every day. The company currently serves nearly 12,000 physicians in 150 markets across the U.S. For more information, visit www.perfectserve.com.