For Hospital Executives...

At the majority of health care facilities in the U.S., hospital-to-physician contact suffers from a not-so-benign neglect. To illustrate, consider the following seven questions:

1. Do you know how many calls are placed to physicians on your medical staff each month?
2. Do you know how many calls a nurse must make, on average, before contact with the desired physician is achieved?
3. Do you know how many direct patient care hours you lose because of the time your nurses spend tracking down doctors?
4. Do you know how long urgent clinical decisions are postponed because nurses are unable to locate doctors when they need them? Or the effect those delays have on patient safety?
5. Do you know the level of frustration experienced by nurses and physicians in your hospital because of breakdowns in your current physician contact processes?
6. When your organization faces a liability claim, are you able to provide documentation regarding your nurse-to-physician contact process?
7. Do you know how much referral revenue you are losing because your physicians are unable to easily communicate their hospital preference to specialists?

PerfectServe offers a standardized, predictable and precise physician contact process.

PerfectServe One-2-One lets physicians and nurses contact any doctor on your medical staff at any moment in time, simply by dialing a single phone number. Calls are routed more quickly — with greater accuracy and reliability — because PerfectServe knows how every physician wishes to be reached at every moment of every day.

In this way, PerfectServe can speed and simplify physician contact in your hospital, and help you achieve:

• Greater patient safety and improved quality of care.
• Greater nursing staff productivity, patient flow and increased utilization of facility resources.
• Greater physician satisfaction and enhanced revenue.
• Greater nursing staff retention and enhanced recruitment.
• Improved defense against liability claims.

Safer hospital-to-physician contact.

PerfectServe measurably — and dramatically — reduces the opportunity for preventable error in the physician contact process. The reason? PerfectServe requires callers to make fewer steps, fewer decisions and fewer communication hand-offs in the course of contacting physicians.

Up to 71 percent reduction in hospital-to-physician contact cycle-time.

Independent research by Colorado University proved PerfectServe can reduce nurse-to-physician communication cycle-times by as much as 71 percent — and increase the number of contacts completed in two minutes by a factor of 10.

The more efficient, more streamlined PerfectServe process means that — not only are clinical decisions made more quickly — but, PerfectServe helps reduce the risk of adverse events caused by delays in care.

Precise process measures bring more accountability and reduced hospital liability.

PerfectServe automatically collects a tremendous amount of data previously unavailable to clinical leaders and hospital administrators. So you now have ways to measure, evaluate and improve the performance of your physician contact processes on an ongoing basis.

With PerfectServe you can know:

• How many calls you make to physicians, when they occur and from which departments they originate.
• Which physicians you contact and how often.
• Whether or not the desired physician was on call, and if not, who was covering.
• How we attempted to contact each physician and whether or not a call was completed in real time or resulted in a message.

The message type, the notification attempts we make, the precise time a voice message was retrieved and the time the physician replied.

So, when an issue arises, you always have a way to determine what happened and why. Which means your hospital is always protected.

Lost patient care hours recovered.

We have found that nurses in one 222-bed hospital make more than 130,000 calls to doctors each year concerning patient care issues.

With PerfectServe, they've succeeded in reducing the median communications cycle-time by 5.5 minutes per call — allowing them to recover some 12,000 hours of direct patient care.

The resulting increase in nursing staff productivity — valued at $490,000 annually, in this example — is clear.

Improved patient flow.

Faster hospital-to-physician communication means faster clinical decisions. So with PerfectServe, referrals can be completed more quickly, and admissions, discharges and transfers of care can occur with less delay.

Greater physician and nurse satisfaction.

The University of Colorado study determined that physicians and nurses both expressed strong preferences for PerfectServe versus the 'status quo' approach to physician contact. Why?

With PerfectServe:

• Nurses are relieved of the risk and responsibility of keeping track of multiple physician call schedules, phone numbers and individual contact preferences. PerfectServe does all that for them.
• Physicians have much greater control over how they are reached — at every moment of the day. Also, they have direct, single-number access to every physician colleague on staff, which makes contacting colleagues much easier.
• Nurses and physicians alike experience fewer contact errors, less frustration and less fault-finding because communication is more timely.

A clear advantage for physicians. A competitive advantage for you.

In most competitive environments, the best opportunity for hospitals to increase revenues lies with those members of their medical staff who split admissions.

With PerfectServe, primary care physicians experience less difficulty communicating specific requests to consultants — and consultants find it easier to communicate findings to primary care physicians.

This makes the practice of medicine easier for physicians in hospitals that use PerfectServe — which can only help enhance market share and revenue for you.

Hospital One-2-One Brochure(Download PDF)