How Healthcare Automation Helped Her Practice Grow

Organization
Sound Beach Pediatrics

Location
Stamford, Fairfield County, Connecticut

Implemented Solutions
PerfectServe Practice Communication & Lightning Bolt Scheduling

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Background

Dr. Katherine Noble, M.D. (“Dr. Katy”), is the founder and managing partner of Sound Beach Pediatrics, serving families in lower Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York, for over nine years. Her passion for healthcare automation began when she realized technology could help her launch, manage, and grow her practice more efficiently.

In 2016, Dr. Katy implemented PerfectServe’s medical answering service, known as Practice Communication, quickly seeing how it streamlined HIPAA-compliant messaging and improved after-hours call management. She found the app easy to use, reducing stress and minimizing communication errors by bypassing human operators. The ability to review recorded calls and contact information added further value. When her local hospital adopted PerfectServe, she was excited to seamlessly align the hospital’s on-call schedule with her practice’s template.

“Taking call is a very critical piece of my practice,” Dr. Katy said. “[Call] can create stress and disruption. Any cost-effective way to reduce that burden can improve physician quality of life and our ability to recruit new providers.”

—Dr. Katherine Noble | Founder of Sound Beach Pediatrics

Challenge

PerfectServe helped Sound Beach Pediatrics handle the increasing number of inbound after-hours calls without difficulty. As Dr. Katy’s practice grew, she hired more physicians to support her patient load. She quickly realized that an advanced practice scheduling solution would be needed to create more complex schedules for her providers, which included on-call and hospital rounding shifts. Patients also expressed a desire to schedule appointments further in advance, so the scheduling solution needed to be intelligent, versatile, and easy to use.

Dr. Katy needed a solution that could also:

Balance the call schedule, including weekend coverage and holidays
Prevent gaps in patient care and minimize mistakes
Accommodate customizable physician schedules based on physician preferences, such as preferred number of shifts a week or preferred days off each month
Guarantee an appropriate balance between physician and clinical support staff schedules
Empower the nurse manager to manage shifts for an increasing number of part-time nurses and medical assistants
Integrate with the existing answering service to ensure phone calls after hours were always directed to the correct provider on call

In 2018, she implemented PerfectServe’s Lightning Bolt Scheduling solution in her own practice. She took comfort in knowing this system was used with great success by her residency program at a large children’s hospital. The software allowed her to optimize provider schedules and ensure equity and transparency in the on-call schedule.

“[The integration] is an efficient, clean method to organize call. It’s easy for families to use and easy for physicians to use,” Dr. Katy said. “I think the pricing has been very fair. I feel like I’m getting a great value [from PerfectServe].”

—Dr. Katherine Noble | Founder of Sound Beach Pediatrics

Synced Physician On-Call Schedules
Lightning Bolt and Practice Communication allowed Sound Beach Pediatrics to streamline its call-scheduling process. The medical answering service software now uses Lightning Bolt’s real-time schedule to ensure that all calls are routed to the right provider at the right time—even after hours.

“When PerfectServe and Lightning Bolt developed a partnership, I was thrilled because it offered a perfect sync!” Dr. Katy said.

Time Savings
Lightning Bolt’s automation assists with the on-call schedule-building process, reducing the time it takes to build each schedule and minimizing the chance of error in the process. Because she spends less time managing requests and editing the schedule, Dr. Katy has more time for direct patient care and growing her business.

Lightning Bolt’s equalization rules have also allowed the nurse manager to rest assured that shifts are optimized and fairly distributed for providers and clinical support staff.

“One of my employed physicians now helps me with the physician schedule because the complexity is such that, with seven providers working all different days of the week, it takes more than one critical eye. It’s really helpful to have somebody help me handle that complexity, and I always have the bird’s eye view. It’s all been very positive!”

Transparent Shift Schedules
With Lightning Bolt, all users can look in the app and generate reports to ensure that the providers are being scheduled equitably.

This means Dr. Katy can ensure no single provider is feeling too much of the strain from handling call. Transparency and equity matter for Sound Beach, and with PerfectServe’s “equity reports,” providers can see that Dr. Katy means what she says.

“One of the principles of my business practice internally is to have a very transparent, equal sharing of call responsibilities on weekends and holidays,” Dr. Katy said. “At any given moment, any of my doctors, including myself, can log in and take a look and see if the call schedule is equitable. It bolsters what I feel I’m able to provide.”

Improve Communication and Scheduling at the Same Time
Integrating a clinical communication solution with an optimized scheduling tool improves workflows in a number of ways:

Alleviates lost or misrouted messages
Helps providers collaborate faster
Manages shift swaps and time-off requests in a
convenient app
Promotes easy access to real-time on-call schedules

Happier Patients
Patients and their family members expect a consistent, positive experience when they call for care, regardless of when they need it. But if on-call schedules aren’t up to date, messages can be misrouted to the wrong provider. Integrating Lightning Bolt with Practice Communication allows Sound Beach Pediatrics to ensure every message gets to the right on-call doctor, during work and after hours. Lightning Bolt easily manages schedule changes and shift swaps for vacations or personal time, eliminating coverage gaps.

Since implementation, Dr. Katy reported “an absence of patient complaints. We rarely, if ever, get complaints that somebody couldn’t get a hold of us or couldn’t figure out how to use the PerfectServe service. I think it’s very easy for our families to use.”

Patients now know exactly how to reach urgent or non-urgent help, and they can leave detailed messages so the on-call pediatricians can prepare for a call back.

Conclusion

With the power of Lightning Bolt and Practice Communication at her fingertips, Dr. Katy sees everything from a bird’s-eye view as a practice owner. She can make wise scheduling decisions for her growing practice while improving staff and physician satisfaction with better communication processes.

For patients, calling the practice is stress free. They know they’ll be guided to the right destination, whether they’ve got an urgent or non-urgent issue to discuss. This is a real-life example of how healthcare technology and automation can make it easier for medical professionals to do their jobs while improving access to care for patients.

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