Top Ten Reasons To Fire Your Medical Answering Service
Over the past several months I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many physicians and practice managers interested in On Call Central as a replacement for their medical answering service. The discussions frequently return to a handful of key points, and I have compiled these into a top ten list of reasons you should fire your medical answering service.
- Reliability. Most clients call us because they are very unhappy with the reliability of their medical answering service. Live operators are typically poorly trained, and the industry is burdened with high employee turnover rates. Quality varies greatly from day to day (and hour to hour) based on the operator who answers the phone. On Call Central establishes a consistent protocol that is followed each time a patient or other provider contacts your practice, and provides a level of reliability atypical of a medical answering service.
- Professionalism. Operators who receive calls for OB/Gyns and cardiologists require a different skill set and should be held to higher professional standards than those receiving calls from plumbers and electricians. Unfortunately, it is difficult or impossible to continually assess the professionalism of a live medical answering service, and many providers realize the problem only after a patient complaint. Establishing a consistent protocol, and automating the handling of calls ensures that your patients receive a consistent, professional interaction day or night.
- Privacy & HIPAA. Live medical answering services constitute an unnecessary “middleman” HIPAA risk that can put your practice at risk for the disclosure of protected health information. A well-designed, secure automated system is far superior to a live operator when it comes to protecting sensitive patient information. Since On Call Central enables direct provider/patient communications with no middleman, privacy risks are significantly reduced.
- Call Schedule Management. The majority of medical answering services use antiquated technology to manage the call schedule. Most medical answering services require practices to fax a copy of the call schedule and call in any last minute modifications. On Call Central puts you in control. Members of your practice can update the call schedule at any time through the On Call Central web interface, or even change the person on call through their On Call Central voicemail box using a dial-by-name directory.
- Cost. Medical answering services bill based on minutes used. Minutes in excess of the allotment are billed at a significantly higher rate. The result is that cost can vary significantly from months to month; we have, in fact, seen bills that vary by a factor of 2-3X based on only minimal incremental usage. On Call Central offers a fixed rate structure based on the number of providers who take call. Your bill is the same each month.
- Documentation. Studies show that only 30% of patient phone calls are documented. On Call Central automatically time stamps all incoming voicemails and return calls. Additionally, we archive all patient voicemail, and allow providers to attach audio and written notes to patient communications. The documentation process through On Call Central is far superior to a live medical answering service, and it helps protect your practice from frivolous medical malpractice claims.
- Caller ID Block. If you’ve ever had a patient call you on your cell phone at 3AM, you know the value of caller ID block. When you return a call through On Call Central we display the caller ID number of your choice (e.g. your office number), not your personal contact information. Most medical answering services do not connect you directly to callers, and those that do usually bill you for the service.
- Automated Backups and Reminders. If you do not listen to a patient message within a specified amount of time, On Call Central can automatically send you a reminder, or notify a backup provider. No medical answering service can respond in a rules-based manner to remind providers and escalate communications in instances where a message in unheard.
- Call Recording. On Call Central makes it easy to record and archive live patient calls. If call recording is enabled, callers are automatically notified, making the recording compliant with laws in all 50 states.
- Device Elimination. Since On Call Central works with cell phones, pagers and landlines, you can eliminate any unnecessary or redundant devices. Many medical answering services are unable to send notification via cell phone text message, meaning that you often have to carry around an extra device.
Medical Answering Services And Documentation of Calls
In developing On Call Central as an alternative medical answering service, one of the issues we have attempted to address is provider non-compliance as it pertains to the process of documenting patient phone interactions. In research the scope of the problem, we not only spoke with a large number of providers, but looked for peer-reviewed studies examining documentation rates in clinical medicine. The results, quite frankly, are depressing and underscore the need for new methods of ensuring documentation of phone interactions.
Two Peer Reviewed Studies
In contrast to face-to-face interactions occurring during normal office hours, after hours phone calls are documented poorly, if at all. Though the number of studies examining patient/physician phone interactions is small, it seems likely from my recent discussions with providers that the conclusions of two older peer reviewed studies (the abstracts of which I have pasted below) remain accurate today. Emphasis mine below.
The first is a 1989 study by Hamadeh conducted at a single family practice residency program (thanks to Jan Cartwright of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine for providing access to this now difficult-to-find study):
It is not known how many of the telephone calls received by family medicine residents get documented in a retrievable form. This descriptive study attempted to answer this question by comparing a university telephone operator’s logbook to the files of after-hours encounter slips kept in a university based family medicine training program. Over a period of 10 weeks, 38% of the calls recorded by the operator were documented by residents in a retrievable fashion. Second-year residents documented calls significantly more than third-year residents, and all residents kept better documentation on calls that concerned young children. Documentation varied significantly among individual residents but was not affected by the day or time of calls. These results suggest that having a system for recording after-hours telephone calls is not sufficient to ensure adequate documentation. Monitoring after-hours call records may provide a solution.
A multi-site study by Hannis, et. al., conducted in a sample of internal medicine residents, arrived at similar conclusions:
Little is known about the mechanisms used in internal medicine residency programs to handle patient telephone calls. To address this, a survey of internal medicine residents was conducted at 10 different internal medicine residency programs. The response rate was 76% (N = 388). Approximately 90% of the residents handled patient telephone calls. The residents saw a mean of 7 patients per week in clinic (standard deviation +/- 2) and received an average of 2 patient calls daily (standard deviation +/- 2). The mean number of patient calls received each night on-call was 3 (standard deviation +/- 6) and on weekend call days, an average of 4 patient calls were received (standard deviation +/- 8). Internal medicine residents reported spending an average of 7 minutes per call talking to the patient (standard deviation +/- 5) and 8 minutes in follow-up activities (standard deviation +/- 6). Residents reported documenting calls less than 35% of the time. Residents disagreed with the statements “I am very satisfied with my patient telephone call system” and “My patients are very satisfied with my telephone call system.” Most internal medicine residents handle a significant amount of patient telephone calls, and the systems for handling these calls are less than satisfactory. The procedures used to manage patient calls and the training for this component of practice should be improved.
Conclusions From Studies of Documenting Patient Phone Calls
Collectively these studies suggest several findings:
- Overall documentation rates are awful. With more than 60% of phone interactions going undocumented, there is an unacceptably high amount of risk for both the patient and provider.
- Documentation rates decrease as a provider’s career progresses. The Hamadeh study found that PGY3s documented calls at a significantly lower rate than PGY2s (31% -vs- 42%). While the pace of decline likely decreases over time, my conversations with providers suggests that a small minority of calls are documented, and an even smaller percentage make it into patient charts.
- Manual methods of documentation fail. Providers cannot be reasonably expected to document calls in a manual manner. Automated procedures that document and preserve the interaction are necessary to overcome the degree of provider non-compliance.
