Hospitalist

Paula Bruggensmith, M.D.

Our group's call requirements are fairly complex. We cover two different hospitals, and we have admitting physicians on call at both at any given time, as well as several other physicians who fill other roles at different times at both hospitals.

Our old answering service had trouble dealing with even the simplest, most straightforward call schedule. We used to give them an Excel spreadsheet with names, phone numbers and times, and they still made mistakes — quite routinely. They would call the wrong physicians for the wrong hospital's patients, or they would lose messages altogether. It was intolerable.

Also, the hospital personnel who were trying to reach us would sometimes have to wait fifteen minutes just to get through to one of their operators. And these are people whose time is at a tremendous premium.

Since we've been using PerfectServe, we have had no trouble. Colleagues get through to the right doctor every time, with absolutely no time spent on hold — which is so valuable. We get the messages precisely and cleanly, with the right message going to the right doctor, with the right call-back number always attached. In fact colleagues have told us they are surprised at the near-immediacy of our call-backs. It actually catches them off-guard.

With PerfectServe, we have no more dropped messages, no colleagues or hospital staff waiting for ten or fifteen minutes waiting to get into the system to leave a message. It all happens immediately, effortlessly, flawlessly. And PerfectServe is so easy to use.

We are even able to ask PerfectServe to accommodate some of the scheduling complexities we'd always wanted to employ but didn't dare to before because of our answering service's limitations.

We very much appreciate the fact that all of our different physicians can structure their call protocols to suit their own preferences. No longer do we all have to handle call the same way our colleagues do because the answering service can't even keep a simple call schedule straight. We each handle call the way we want — with messaging, or direct call-through to a cell phone, whatever.

We are ecstatic with our PerfectServe service, and we would not consider ever again settling for the limitations or the inaccuracies of an operator-based system. We consider PerfectServe an excellent value; it's become a trusted partner in our practice, one we find utterly reliable and tremendously useful.