How Do Other Practices Handle Their Phones?

How are you managing your calls right now?

Do you feel that everything is easy, that there is no need to change things up?

Let me share with you the story of a private practice that has grown too comfortable with how they manage their calls. For the purpose of confidentiality, I will not be using any real names.

Some time ago, just as I was about to head out of the office, I got a call from Suzanne. She was told that I might be able to present some solutions to so many issues that their practice was facing.

Suzanne manages a private facility owned by Dr. A, who’s been in practice for over a decade. Dr. A, in his late 50s, is comfortable with how things are, and this frustrates Suzanne. She’s someone who’s in the trenches highly involved in their day-to-day operations. Suzanne knows there has to be a way to make things better.

Here are Suzanne’s frustrations:



• It’s time-consuming to have to manually add numbers to patients’ profiles, and then look them up and dial their phones to contact them. These things increase the chances of human error.

• When reviewing voicemails they are not sure if a particular concern has been addressed or what next steps should be taken to correctly attend to those callers.

• Dr. A and his staff would take a long time returning voicemails and even miss a significant portion of them.

• There had been too many times a patient would stress how they’d already discussed a particular matter with the last person they talked to, and it was exhausting for them having to repeat themselves on every call.