Summit Health Automates After-Hours Communication & Scheduling

Executive Summary

• Paper to Platform: Manual schedules and phone tag are gone — Summit now operates on one connected platform for communication and scheduling.
• Accountability Turned the Curve: Clear communication channels with built-in backups & escalations allow 50% of urgent patient calls to be resolved in < 5 minutes.
• Smarter, Faster Scheduling: 60% of shifts auto-generate in Lightning Bolt, giving physicians more control and fewer administrative headaches.
• Game-Changing Lab Workflow: After-hours lab results now reach the right provider instantly with full context and read receipts.
• Connected Care Without Boundaries: Providers can message across different EHRs and organizations to coordinate care any time, anywhere.

Before PerfectServe, Summit Health tracked physician coverage manually, using methods like paper schedules and Excel spreadsheets. Staff responsible for this process were dedicated and understood the organization’s requirements, but building and managing schedules by hand took a fair amount of time and required an extra dose of vigilance to reduce the likelihood of errors or oversights. And because schedules weren’t maintained in one system, coverage visibility across the organization wasn’t as consistent as they wanted it to be—it wasn’t ideal for staff to have to reference multiple static schedules to get the full picture.

After-hours call management, which was handled by a thirdparty vendor, also needed some help to meet Summit’s standards. Providing top-notch, attentive patient care is one of their primary differentiators, so this vendor’s shortcomings— including limited customization options for their app and phone menus, a high turnover rate for their agents, surprise fees that popped up far too often, and inefficiencies that occasionally impacted patient hold times—stood out right away.

For the team at Summit, it became clear that their organization had simply outgrown the vendor’s capabilities, and they knew they needed to make a switch to maintain both patient and clinician satisfaction.

Choosing a Partner for Change

According to Jasmin Young, Director of Program & Initiatives for Summit Health’s Primary Care Service Line, the organization needed a healthcare-native technology partner that could:

• Facilitate better communication and scheduling workflows across the organization.
• Provide predictable costs and eliminate “meter-running” phone charges.
• Deliver enhanced compliance, security, and analytics as first-class requirements.
• Reduce administrative burden so they could “let doctors be doctors,” which meant protecting nights and weekends and allowing them to focus on patient care.
• Offer scalable technology without forcing an overly aggressive leap into AI.

PerfectServe’s clinical focus, strong customer references, and combination of important functionality—covering clinical communication, after-hours call management, physician scheduling, and even an integration with Conduit Health Partners, a nurse triage service—tipped the scales.

RESULTS

Faster Responses, Schedule Automation, Greater Accountability

A year into Summit Health’s partnership with PerfectServe, the impact has been dramatic and multifaceted:

Rapid Callbacks:

50% of urgent patient calls are now resolved in under 5 minutes, and 89% receive a callback within 30 minutes (based on 2,000+ interactions).

Backups and Automatic Escalation:

PerfectServe’s ability to include built-in backups and escalations for every communication “made response time everyone’s business—accountability turned the curve,” Jasmin noted. “If the primary recipient doesn’t respond, it escalates automatically.” This escalation to service line leaders creates peer accountability and eliminates the old “I never got the call” excuse.

Nurse Triage and ED Diversion:

In pediatrics, a one-month sample showed that roughly 75% of 155 nurse triage calls were safely diverted from the ED. In another instance, a pulmonary patient who previously would have gone to the ED instead received a rapid refill because the triage nurse captured the nuance and used PerfectServe to alert the physician immediately. This kind of real-time collaboration simply isn’t possible when people can’t easily communicate with one another.

Scheduling Automation:

Of 53 scheduled assignments (where an “assignment” correlates with a specific type of shift), 31 (or 60%) are already auto-generated in Lightning Bolt, with plans to increase that percentage over time. “[Lightning Bolt] gave us a source of truth for schedules and a way to honor physician time off without spreadsheets and Post-It notes,” Jasmin explained. Providers can plan their lives months ahead, request time off in a single system, and build after-hours coverage around external hospital schedules they don’t control. Autogeneration is also a tremendous time saver for those who used to build schedules with no technology assistance.

Unified Schedule Increases Visibility:

Having one source of truth for scheduling—versus schedules being kept in Excel files or on dry erase boards that aren’t visible to other offices—has removed a common roadblock for Summit. Efficient patient care requires everyone to have access to a real-time schedule so they can easily see who’s working at any given moment.

Lab Communication: A Game-Changing Workflow

One of the most striking improvements for Summit relates to after-hours delivery of lab results, which was once a source of frustration and unnecessary cost.

Previously, lab staff had to call the answering service to see who was on call as they tried to relay results to providers. Summit was billed for every call. Because non-clinical agents couldn’t share lab results, providers would either call the lab back directly or wait on hold so an agent could connect them with the lab.

Today, the lab enters results directly into a web interface powered by PerfectServe and Lightning Bolt schedules, which automatically routes to the correct provider. Providers receive context-rich messages with read receipts, which allows them to make instant decisions without a call back.

“Our lab-to-provider flow went from phone tag and guesswork to secure messages full of information with read receipts,” Jasmin said. “It saves time for both providers and lab staff and ensures critical results get to the right person fast. These folks are so happy—nobody has to pick up a phone and sit on hold anymore. They’re loving it.”

The next goal is to automate lab result delivery end to end so that every critical result is received and acted on within an hour—whether that means acknowledging the result, starting treatment, or another appropriate next step. This automation will also extend to outside labs like LabCorp and Quest to keep everything on the same fast track.