The July 2017 Issue


MedCall Plus: medical support center

The One Sure Thing About the Future of Healthcare

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan

I don’t like to write about politics, but politicians in the United States is once again messing with healthcare. Some call it to repeal, and others view it as repair. Some are for it and others oppose it. No one knows for sure how things will shake out or when it will happen if anything happens at all.

Whether you view the status quo as good or bad, the maneuverings of the politicians and the soundbites of the pundits are disruptive. This makes it hard to plan: hard for healthcare providers, hard for healthcare insurance companies, and hard for healthcare consumers.

Regardless of the outcome, however, there is one thing I’m sure of. Medical call centers will continue to play a key role in the provision of care now and a bigger role in the future. Healthcare call centers stand in the healthcare gap, improving patient care, enhancing population health, and reducing per capita healthcare costs. No group is better positioned to achieve these three goals.

Yes, the one sure thing in healthcare today is that medical call centers will play a key role in providing quality, cost-effective solutions tomorrow. The only variable is how big that role will be.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Medical Call Center News. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.


The Receptionist Model for Telephone Triage Calls

By Mark Dwyer

Many triage call centers employ non-clinical staff to frontend the triage calls. This process is often referred to as the receptionist model. Hospitals that use this model typically provide the non-clinical staff with a predefined set of criteria to rank the acuity level of patients’ symptoms. These acuity levels are determined by key symptoms and terms used by patients when describing their symptoms.

Certain keywords together with certain known related conditions shape a likely emergent disposition. This is often done by providing the non-clinical staff with a list of key symptoms and conditions. If they exist, then direct the individual processing the call to interrupt a nurse currently on a call with a less acute patient. In this scenario, the nurse parks the current call, freeing her line to accept the potentially urgent call. If the call is deemed non-emergent, it is added to the nurses’ follow-up outbound call queue with the appropriately assigned acuity.

The best way to verify that each call added into the nurse callback queue has been assigned an appropriate acuity level would be to have all calls reviewed, assessed and, if needed, adjusted by acuity. To facilitate this, many sites have a charge nurse responsible for managing the queue throughout the day, making sure the highest acuity requests remain listed at the top of the “requests received for nurse callback” queue. Generally, callbacks should be made within thirty to forty minutes of receipt of the initial request.

Mark Dwyer is a 30-year veteran of the healthcare call center industry and the COO at LVM Systems, which provides healthcare call center software.


Healthcare Call Center News

Hospital CIOs Surveyed about Data Security and Clinical Mobility

Over the past twenty years, the avenues for sharing protected health information have multiplied, and data breaches have become much too common. In March 2017, Spok surveyed over 100 hospital CIOs to see how pressing the data security concern is for IT executives. They compiled the results and some interesting ones include:

Hospital secure texting:

  • 41 percent do not currently support HIPAA-compliant secure texting on any device but are planning to do so in the future.
  • 39 percent have secure texting only for personal devices.
  • 35 percent supply secure texting only on hospital issued devices.
  • 26 percent provide secure texting on both personal and hospital issued devices.

Secure communication methods used by clinical staff:

  • 88 percent use encrypted email.
  • 48 percent use HIPAA-compliant secure texting.
  • 48 percent use in-building Wi-Fi phones.
  • 17 percent use encrypted pagers.

Top four reasons why hospitals use pagers:

  • Most appropriate device for specific employee groups or departments
  • Reliability
  • Cost and time savings
  • Easy workflow integration

To underscore the severity of this data security issue, 95 percent of hospital CIOs are concerned about their data being compromised, but 26 percent are unsure how much PHI (personal health information) is being shared using unsecure technology.

Mobility and clinical process improvements are important to hospital leaders, and CIOs plan to make impactful changes,” said Spok. “However, the execution remains a work in progress. Greater than 30 percent of clinical staff cannot receive messages from colleagues on mobile devices.”


A Thought for Today

“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they’re called memories. Some take us forward, they’re called dreams.” -Jeremy Irons

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