LEXINGTON, Kentucky and TORONTO, Ontario, March 5, 2012 – On Call Central has announced a strategic partnership with Prompt Alert Inc. to provide high quality, innovative, web-based solutions to medical practice management problems in broader markets. The partnership will immediately expand the potential client base for both companies by opening reciprocal access to the other’s existing customer base. Going forward, On Call Central and Prompt Alert intend to continue expanding their respective market shares by offering complementary “best in breed” software solutions.
On Call Central is an automated call management system that triages incoming patient and provider calls through customizable logic trees. The system rapidly connects screened calls with the appropriate clinician then securely records and archives the conversations for easy documentation. Prompt Alert’s Patient Prompt™ system delivers a fully automated patient communication platform that integrates calls with the practice’s existing management software.
Sidney VanNess, Ph.D., CEO of On Call Central, praises the Patient Prompt™ system, “The integration with practice management systems is something that is very unique. It just struck me as a product in that space that was doing things that other companies haven’t even tried to do yet. The product actually learns and responds in reaction to patient feedback.”
When asked about the new partnership, Prompt Alert CEO, Jeremy Greven states, “Patient Prompt helps practices realize an increase in both revenue and patient satisfaction by automating a client facing portion of their business. This partnership with On Call Central will provide a natural service extension to my clients, helping them to continue realizing the benefits of automated patient communications. We are pleased to be able to partner with On Call Central who, like Patient Prompt, I would consider to be the market leader.”
Mr. Greven continues, “When you are making this kind of a partnership decision, you want to take the time to find the best and I think that is what we have done with On Call Central.”
Both chief executives are eager to explore avenues for synergy and integration of both software systems.
About On Call Central
On Call Central provides a more efficient solution that replaces a medical provider’s traditional medical answering service. On Call Central is a web-based call management system that tracks, routes and archives patient calls, provider responses and post-call patient directives. It uses the latest technology to eliminate communication breakdowns and improve patient care, while protecting providers from the risk associated with after-hours calls.
About Patient Prompt and Prompt Alert Inc.
Patient Prompt(TM) is a product of Prompt Alert Inc. a privately owned technology solution provider specializing in patient communication in the healthcare sector. Established in 2004, Prompt Alert Inc. introduced its highly successful patient communication tool, Patient Prompt(TM) to service enterprise level practices seeking a customized, flexible, and fully scalable automated patient communication tool. Since its launch, Patient Prompt(TM) has been the fastest growing patient communication tool in North America, servicing a wide variety of group practices and specialties such as, Cardiology, Gastroenterology, Endoscopy, Orthopedics, Nephrology, and Oncology
The August 18th issue of the New England Journal of Medicine contained what has to be one of the most robust studies of medical malpractice risk ever conducted. Anupam B. Jena and a bunch of other smarties at Harvard Medical School sifted though over 40,000 records from a major national medical malpractice carrier. The data, collected over a 15-year period, included over 230,000 physician-years of coverage and was large enough to derive specialty-specific risk metrics for 25 specialties. You are encouraged to spend a few minutes reading through their outstanding analysis here. In reading this paper, providers and practice managers can come to a better understanding with respect to several depressing pieces of data, including:
- How likely you are to be sued in a given year
- How likely you are to pay a claim in a given year
- The average size of a claim in your specialty
- Your lifetime risk of facing a claim
- The comparative risk of your specialty relative to other fields of medicine
Given our interest in helping medical groups better manage their medical malpractice risk, we thought it might be useful to slightly extend this work and distill it into a form that would be easily accessible to our uses and prospective clients. Therefore, I reached out to Dr. Jena and requested some of the summary data (which was presented in the paper in graphical form only) and built out a simple model in Excel. The excel model takes Dr. Jena’s data and extrapolates it to calculate the annual risk for a group medical practice. I have placed the data Dr. Jena sent me into the linked Excel workbook so that they can access it if they like (it is in the “Input Parameters” worksheet).
The Math
Though Dr. Jena produced a lot of data, calculating your practices risk is actually fairly simple. To calculate the annual lawsuit risk for your practice, simply calculate the annual risk that an individual physician in your speciality WILL NOT be sued (1-Ri), and raise it to the nth power, where n is the number of physicians in your practice. (1-Ri)^n. This is the annual probability that none of the physicians in your practice will face a lawsuit in a given year. The difference is obviously the risk that you will be sued in a given year. We perform similar calculations to determine the probability that someone in your practice will face a claim. Also, we extrapolate this data out over ten years to show what your overall risk is.
The Model
Below is a brief explanatory video showing how the model works. You can download the Excel model and use it to calculate your practice’s medical malpractice risk. Excel Risk Model.
Over the past several days we have rolled out some new features, most deriving directly from customer requests. These updates include, but are not limited to:
- Provider notification log. When a message is left for the on call provider, we automatically document each attempt at notifying the provider. This audit log is accessible under the actions column for each incoming call.
- Dissertation deterrent. We have added a variable that allows practices to define a maximum message duration. This variable can be used to politely cut off long-winded callers after a reasonable amount of time. The default value, currently applied to all accounts, is 90 seconds. Within a few days you will be able to modify this variable via the On Call Central web interface.
- Updates to call schedule management. We have updated the call schedule management portion of the On Call Central telephony application such that it notifies the user who is currently on call for each call schedule prior to asking the user to put someone new on call. This functionality only applies to accounts with multiple call schedules.
November 6, 2009 by
sidney ·
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In the past several weeks I’ve been speaking with providers and practice managers frustrated by the quality of after-hours communications. Despite dissatisfaction with their current service, many providers have the impression that a live service is somehow better for patient care. I’ve been skeptical and have been looking for some objective data on this topic. I’ve just found it.
One of the few peer reviewed studies to examine the comparative effectiveness of live –vs- automated communications systems was published about ten years ago by Moss and colleagues in the Department of Medicine at Emory University (where I spent years laboring on my Ph.D.!). The article can be accessed for free here or can be downloaded as a PDF.
The overarching goal of the study was to characterize clinician response times to pages originating from the intensive care unit (ICU) at two university-affiliated hospitals. The study examined a total of 402 pages sent to 166 different physicians when the page was either a) sent directly to the provider or b) through a 3rd party intermediary such as an answering service or a physician’s office. The difference was stark, and most certainly did not support the notion that “live is better.”
Key data points include:
- The median response time for a direct paging system was 2 minutes compared to 9 minutes for indirect systems relying on a 3rd party intermediary.
- Slow responses (≥ 15 min) were observed in 40% of all indirect pages compared with only 8% of direct pages.
- Twenty-five percent of the pages placed through an indirect system (e.g. answering service) were associated with a response time of ≥ 29 min.
Collectively, these data suggest that simple, automated systems are more likely to result in timely responses to patient care issues, particularly in urgent situations.
