Streamlined Contacts, Process Transparency, and HIPAA Compliance at Half the Cost

Practice

A large hospitalist practice specializing in geriatric patients with ~50 practitioners and 100+ facilities, including primary care clinics, hospitals and medical centers, skilled nursing facilities, long-term care facilities, independent living residences, and short-term rehab centers.

Prior to PerfectServe

Clinicians visited each client facility according to a preset schedule. Whenever a patient needed additional attention, personnel would call in the patient’s situation to a triage center staffed by seven LPNs. The triage nurse would either respond to the issue herself or, when warranted, contact a clinician and relay the information. The nurse or the clinician would then call the facility back and relay the treatment plan.

Challenges

Contact between triage nurses, clinicians, and client facilities was time-consuming and complex, often taking an hour or more to complete the cycle. When a practitioner called the facility back, he or she might not connect with the original caller, who would continue to wait for a callback.

Additionally, relaying this information through a third party increased the potential for miscommunication, and the process meant protected health information (PHI) was not always locked down.

Solution

After assessing the organization’s pain points, PerfectServe recommended their clinical communication solution that would allow staff in all client locations to contact practitioners directly by calling or texting a single number that assured they would always reach the right practitioner in a HIPAA=compliant manner. The new setup would reduce cycle times and miscommunication, and each clinician could decide how to accept his or her own contacts. Emergency calls would be routed through the triage station to make sure they received immediate attention.

Transition

A task force of six clinicians was established to work out a set of usage recommendations that would be given to the rest of the staff when PerfectServe was implemented practice-wide, which guaranteed there were no surprises.

The PerfectServe implementation specialist spent time on site working out a call flowchart that accommodated the organization’s unique workflows.

Staff immediately experienced a major improvement in call cycle times, and call handoffs were virtually eliminated. As a bonus, PerfectServe was also significantly less expensive than the answering service provider the organization used previously.

Results

Cost Savings: Compared to the third-party answering service the organization previously paid for after-hours call support, PerfectServe’s fee for 24-hour coverage is about half as much.

Streamlined Care: Call cycles dropped to just a few minutes—far less time than before PerfectServe.

Process Transparency: PerfectServe provided regular contact reports that included information about day/time, origin, recipient, and duration for all calls. This made it easier to identify areas for improvement.

HIPAA Compliance: Since PerfectServe consolidates all PHI within a single, secure platform that accommodates a variety of communication channels, it supports implementation of effective risk management policies. The platform also makes it easy to audit communication trails from beginning to end, which helps with risk monitoring efforts.