Automated Recall System
Is Icing on this Doctor’s Cake
Thomas J. Overberg O.D.
The candles were lit. A chocolate cake with my mom’s famous double-thick
chocolate icing was sitting on the kitchen table. Presents were piled on
the living room couch. Cards had arrived from long-time friends. My sister
Sodhoh and brother Denny both called. It was my 26th birthday. Things were
comfortably the same, yet something was very different.
I was a practicing optometrist and for the first time had a little money
in my pocket. That day a new tradition was born. I decide to get a birthday
present for myself every year. Something special that I would never expect
from anyone else. Something without rhyme or reason. Something that I just
plain wanted. That first year it was a leather basketball. Over the next
years it was small red cars with large engines, trips to Hawaii, Europe,
Mexico, Caribbean, and a solid oak dining room set. (In the meantime, I
got married.)
More recently, the presents have become a little more rational. About
3 years ago I decided to give myself a telephone recall-and-reminder system
that would interface with my office software. The office was paperless
and running day-to-day operations beautifully, until about 4 p.m. every
afternoon. Someone had to drop everything to call and remind the next day’s
patients about their appointment times. Monthly recalls likewise were time-consuming.
It tied up a printer and two employees with stamping and mailing post cards
for two days each month. It hurt office productivity. It drove me nuts.
After researching all the software recall programs, I decided to try
a program called House Calls by TeleVox. The technical support and engineering
people at TeleVox and MaximEyes, my software provider, worked together
to make all daily office appointment reminders and office recalls into
a seamless system.
Every evening just before we close the office, a staff member pushes
a few keys. The system calls patients who have appointments and reminds
them of their scheduled time for the next day. They receive a very nice
message from my receptionist. Each patient listens to the short message
and pushes “#” to confirm, or another key if he or she needs to reschedule.
The system provides me with a report the next morning. If it gets no answer,
it repeatedly calls back. The next morning, the system calls these phone
numbers again to confirm the patient will be arriving on schedule.
This entire process to download the data from our practice management
office system to House Calls and starting the calls takes a staff member
28 seconds. She simply pushes a few keys and walks away. The software does
the rest.
The recall system works the same way. We select the date range of the
last patient appointments that we wish to see and input that into the computer.
The patients receive a message with our receptionist’s voice, asking them
to press the “#” key. We’ve dedicated a phone—our “Bat Phone”—to this system
that rings when someone wants to make an appointment. The total time a
staff member now spends to do an entire month of recalls is less than 10
minutes. We also run second recalls for patients who didn’t respond. That
takes another 10 minutes a month.
The phone recall-and-reminder program cost us about $5,000, and our
phone bill has jumped about $50 month. But we save $500 a month in postage.
We no longer need to purchase pre-printed recall-and-reminder cards, and
we’ve saved hundreds of dollars by using less toner in our printer. Employees
can spend quality time assisting our patients rather than dialing the phone,
listening to busy signals, and talking to answering machines.
The automated recall system more than paid for itself in less than a
year. Now I figure every day that I use it is just icing on the cake, even
if it’s not the double-chocolate icing on my mom’s cake.
Dr. Overberg, a private practitioner in Fremont, Ohio, writes on office
systems and technology.
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