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After hours phone calls revisited (briefly)From: D. Ashley Hill (dahmd@gate.net)Sat Nov 1 09:00:23 1997
Somelist members may remember a brief but heated discussion we had last year about how to handle the volume of after-hours phone calls from patients. Someone from the list e-mailed me this weekend who is having a similar problem and asked how my partners and I finally managed the situation. As a brief recap, we used to have a system where patients phoning our office after- hours were immediately transferred to to the anwering service, who would usually page us. We were getting questions ranging from "what time does the office open" to "what did my last Pap smear show" to "my baby hasn't moved in 2 days." Obviously one would like to know about the latter, even at 3am, while taking care of the former two during regular office hours. So, we simply have a nice, brief recording now that tells callers that this is the after-hours number, to call during these hours if you need a prescription refill, appointment, or to go over lab tests, but to call the following number if this is an emergency and you need to talk to a doctor right away. The response to this simple system has been dramatic. I have been keeping track, and we have decreased our non-emergent calls by 90% but have, to my knowledge, kept all of the emergent calls. There have been no patient complaints and, to my knowledge, no bad outcomes. It seems that if the answering service is contacted patients will simply "page the doctor" whereas if they think about it and need to call a second number, they only call for a true emergency. It's dropped after-hours pages from the office from about 50 a night to about 6. Now, I'm not looking for any comments, and especially do not want to discuss the ethics of being a 24-hour a day answering machine for patients. This is simply a follow-up of a topic we discussed last year. Have a nice weekend. Ashley D. Ashley Hill, M.D. Associate Director Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology Florida Hospital Family Practice Residency Orlando, Florida dahmd@gate.net
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