News Releases
40 Percent of Nurse-To-Physician Contacts Occur in Real-Time at Clinton Memorial Hospital
June 6, 2006
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Fully 40 percent of physician contacts at Clinton Memorial Hospital in Wilmington, Ohio, are routed directly to the desired physician, with conversations carried on in real- time, call data collected by PerfectServe reveals.
“That means no paging, no leaving messages, no trying different devices, no return phone calls. It’s wonderful,” Debbie Pratt, Clinton Memorial Patient Access Coordinator, says.
To appreciate that figure, you have to understand how Clinton Memorial nurses had to contact physicians before PerfectServe, Pratt says.
Overtaxed switchboard
Before PerfectServe, Clinton Memorial Hospital switchboard operators were responsible for locating and contacting physicians. It was their job to keep track of doctors’ on-call schedules, home and office phones, pagers, cell phones, favorite restaurants, etc.
And often, once an operator succeeded in locating a physician – at times, after several calls – she would leave a message for the physician to call back. The switchboard operator would then take the return phone call, and she would be in the same position, having to find the nurse or the physician who had made the original call.
“Contacting physicians was often a haphazard proposition,” Pratt says, and Code Alerts, in which multiple individuals had to be notified within as short a time as possible, the same issues were magnified by the sum of the individuals being notified – which at times numbered in the dozens.
Now, with PerfectServe, the switchboard operators are removed from the contact process entirely. They are free to answer outside calls and offer better service.
Alerts executed in seconds, with just one call
“PerfectServe lets our doctors and nurses communicate directly, often with a single phone call. Our operators never have to help our staff locate or contact physicians. PerfectServe does that far more efficiently than any operator ever could,” Pratt says.
And PerfectServe can contact fifty people as quickly as it can contact one. So Code Alerts can be completed with just one phone call.
A welcomed side benefit of the PerfectServe initiative has been that the switchboard has experienced a surprising decline in incoming phone traffic. “We now have about six thousand fewer calls coming into our switchboard each month,” Pratt says.
“PerfectServe is very valuable to us – it’s been a great tool,” Pratt says. “It saves time and improves efficiency, but most of all, it helps us provide better care to the patients who need us most.”
“Our medical staff has really come to appreciate PerfectServe. You can see why,” she says.
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.