When an infant’s behavior changes or a child’s fever spikes, a parent has several options: call the doctor, bundle the child off to urgent care, call a friend or family member for advice or start looking for information online. Of course the parent may also choose to treat the child without outside help.
For many parents, the obvious first action is to make a phone call to the pediatrician. But what if the problem arises after office hours or on a holiday or weekend? Then the call is fielded by an answering machine that instructs them to leave a message or dial 911—or by an answering service or call center.
Increasingly, hospitals, clinics and medical practitioners are relying on the expertise of specialized call centers to handle after-hours calls.
Triage for such a call requires more than a nice voice to calm an anxious parent. A child’s life may be in the balance, so operators need to remain calm, ask the right questions, follow provider-specific protocols, make appropriate referrals and help the parent stay calm. Depending on the nature of the problem and the provider, the operator may forward a call directly to an on-call physician, refer the caller to 911 or the Emergency Room, recommend that the parent call the doctor the next day or at some other time, or advise the parent to observe the child at home. Some parents who intended to go to the Emergency Room are saved a trip (and the expense) and some who intended to remain home are advised to go to the ER.
While there’s no guarantee of compliance—i.e., whether parents actually take the operator’s advice—two large-scale studies* in Pediatrics indicate that call-center triage is providing appropriate referrals, earning customer satisfaction and is economical for both families and healthcare providers.
AAMCOM has been helping healthcare groups meet their telecommunication needs since 1953. Our specialized team within a team, AnswerPEDIATRICS, employee agents that are highly trained in provider protocols and comply with the standards of the HIPAA Privacy and Security Rules. To learn more, call us today at 800 531-6642.
* http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17272593
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16882795
