St. Joseph's Healthcare

Located in Clinton Township, MI, and part of the joint venture between Trinity Health and Henry Ford Health System, St. Joseph's Healthcare is a 435-bed medical care facility with a medical staff of over 600 physicians.

PerfectServe Provides Accurate, Reliable Physician Contact

St. Joseph’s Healthcare has launched a major initiative to improve patient care through widespread deployment of a more accurate, more reliable physician contact management tool, PerfectServe One-2-One.

“This new communications tool will eliminate time wasted by our nurses tracking doctors down at multiple locations, through multiple contact devices – and the unnecessary interruptions our doctors often experience when they are not on call,” said Dr. Rene Peleman, M.D., Chief of Staff.

“By contrast, PerfectServe allows nurses to contact the precise physician they need through a single, unchanging phone number at any time of day – while giving doctors more control over how they are reached by hospital staff,” Dr. Peleman said.

Direct Physician-To-Physician Contact

“Using their personal PerfectServe access number, physicians will have anytime, anywhere access to the system to contact their colleagues directly, avoiding office switchboards and answering service operators,” Dr. Peleman said. “And using failsafe communications modes, physicians can eliminate lost messages and lost consults.

“With PerfectServe, no one will have to maintain lists of on-call schedules, or multiple phone numbers, or individual instructions to reach a physician. Both doctors and nurses can reach the right physician, at the right time, in the precise way the doctor wants to be reached.”

How PerfectServe One-2-One Works

“PerfectServe creates and maintains a single directory of every St. Joseph’s Healthcare physician,” Terrell Edwards, PerfectServe CEO, said. “We assemble all the variables that determine how each doctor wishes to be reached. Then, when a caller dials into the system, the contact variables are analyzed and the call is automatically routed along the precise call path the physician has defined for that moment in time,” Edwards said.

Physicians Enjoy More Control

PerfectServe offers five significant advantages to busy physicians:

Physicians can employ real-time contact methods – routing calls to mobile, home or office back lines; or secure voice messaging with the ability to send immediate notification – or “push” the message through to any phone defined by the recipient.
Physicians may implement different call handling rules for calls that originate from physician colleagues vs. those from the hospital. These rules can change based on call type, urgency, on-call schedule, etc., giving doctors far greater control than ever before.
Physicians can access messages, sign on and off call, or update contact preferences at any point throughout the day, using any phone, PC or the latest Microsoft smartphone devices.
A single point of administration eliminates the need to distribute last minute call schedule changes to multiple departments and locations.
Because PerfectServe gives doctors access to failsafe messaging processes, callers no longer have to worry about whether a message was received. They know the recipient got their message, uninterrupted, in its entirety, without third-party interpretation.

“Health systems throughout the country have experienced significant improvements in both physician satisfaction and patient care processes with PerfectServe. St. Joe’s is the first medical center in the state to invest in this technology, and I am confident that our physicians will appreciate the system’s many features,” said Angela O’Toole, Director of Physician Support Services.

PerfectServe Addresses The Joint Commission's National Patient Safety Goals

The Joint Commission has determined that communication breakdown is the number one cause of sentinel events in hospitals. For this reason, improving the effectiveness of communication among caregivers is one of The Joint Commission's top three National Patient Safety Goals.

Because PerfectServe reduces communication steps, decision points and hand-offs, it allows for more direct and accurate physician contact. And because it is a standardized process, St. Joseph’s Healthcare will be able to analyze performance, establish goals and measure performance on a continuous basis.