Turn to the telephone to dial up practice efficiency

Practice Management. By Pamela Lewis Dolan, AMNews staff. May 28, 2007.

Relying on new technology and costly solutions are not the only ways to improve efficiencies in your practice.

Experts say many efficiencies can be gained by assessing and improving the use of one of the most basic pieces of office equipment -- the telephone.

While not all calls can or should be eliminated, studying the flow of calls and the time spent on each one could be the key to saving time, experts say. Developing a more efficient phone-use system should start with an analysis of how phone calls are handled at your practice.

Telecommunication management systems can help a practice easily ascertain things like the number of callers in a day, the time spent on each call, where callers end up in the system or the call volume by time of day, according to Dona Sandefur, who is on assignment as chief operating officer of the Queens-Long Island Medical Group for Pivot Healthcare, a practice management firm based in Brentwood, Tenn. Managers at the Long Island clinic track call flows in real-time on a computer screen using a telecommunication management system that can also generate phone usage reports. But the same level of analysis can also be done manually if an automated system is outside of the budget, Sandefur said.

Each person in the practice who answers the phone could be given a legal-size sheet of paper with a vertical column listing times of day, and a horizontal column listing reasons for calls (prescription refills, nurse, appointment, test results, etc.) Each logged call can be noted as to whether the answerer took care of the caller, transferred the call or took a message.