This presentation highlights the weaknesses inherant in today's medical answering services and introduces the concept of medical answering service automation.

1. Medical Answering Services:
Fixing The Weakest Links
Patient care. Anywhere.

2. “It is no surprise that, as the ‘front door’ to most practices,
the telephone has become a target for liability issues,
highlighting a pressing need for increased risk management
training as an important component of telephone care and
medical education.”
- Katz et al
Harvey P. Katz MD, et al
“Patient Safety and Telephone Medicine: Some Lessons from Closed Claim Case Review”
Journal of General Internal Medicine
January 2008

3. The “two common themes in the majority of
malpractice cases are failure to diagnose and a
breakdown in patient-clinician communication”
leading to delayed or wrong diagnoses.
- Katz et al
Harvey P. Katz MD, et al
“Patient Safety and Telephone Medicine: Some Lessons from Closed Claim Case Review”
Journal of General Internal Medicine
January 2008

4. Errors can occur when an answering service
comes between you and your patients.
They may be inadvertent.
They may be rare.
They are not easy to defend.

5. What are the weakest links in a medical answering service
arrangement?
More important: How do we fix them?

6. What it means for practices:
Medical answering services rely on a third-party message-taker to listen to
the caller, note key information, and relay that information to a physician.
Just like when you played the old “telephone game,” important pieces of
information can be lost or misinterpreted when the patient’s concerns are
filtered through the answering service staff.
1. Relaying incomplete or incorrect information

7. What it means for practices:
Medical answering services rely on a third-party message-taker to
determine how to escalate a call.
Even if well trained, answering service staff may have difficulty determining
which cases require urgent attention.
2. Improper escalation

8. What it means for practices:
Call centers are busy. Human intervention brings the risk of human error.
If an operator’s attention is directed elsewhere for a few moments, he or she
may forget to relay the message until much later in the shift.
3. Delays relaying the message

9. What it means for practices:
Medical answering services route calls according to on-call schedules.
If your schedule is outdated, incorrect, or difficult to understand, the operator
may leave a message for the wrong physician.
4. Misdirected messages

10. What it means for practices:
Medical answering services rely on a third-party message-taker to write
down a callback number and then relay that number to a physician.
An illegible or incorrect number could cause significant treatment delays.
5. Wrong callback numbers

11. What it means for practices:
Physicians often return calls on their personal cell phone. This presents a
challenge in the age of Caller ID.
If the physician uses “Anonymous” for privacy reasons, or if a number is
displayed but not recognized, the patient may be reluctant to answer.
6. Callbacks from an unknown number

12. What it means for practices:
Answering services only relay what the caller said. They don’t provide
clinical information such as chronic conditions, drug allergies, and current
medications.
As a result, the physician taking the call does not have crucial information to
ensure the right questions are asked and to make a confident choice about
next steps.
7. Decisions without clinical data

13. How can we …
• Eliminate the third-party message taker and
decision-maker?
• Provide physicians with important clinical
information even when they’re away from the office?
• Provide a better patient experience?
That’s the problem we solved with Diagnotes.

14. How it works:
medical answering service automation
Diagnotes sends a patient-recorded message
to the practitioner. The practitioner receives
the message in the patient’s own words and
voice, not filtered through the answering
service staff.
The practitioner can call back with one touch
– and the patient will see the practice phone
number on Caller ID.

15. How it works:
medical answering service automation
In addition, customers can integrate their electronic medical record (EMR) with
Diagnotes so the system pushes pertinent patient medical information to the
responding physician.
And the practitioner can document the encounter remotely by typing or dictating
into the app.

16. How it works:
medical answering service automation

17. How it works:
medical answering service automation
It’s all delivered securely on
your physicians’ mobile
phones, tablets or laptops.
Diagnotes works on Apple’s
iOS, Android, and through a
web-based application.

18. Diagnotes components
Secure
Texting
Answering
Service
Automation
Provider
Scheduling
Clinical
Documentation
EMR
Integration
Medical answering service automation is one of five HIPAA-compliant
software components that can be combined to fit the needs of your practice –
now and in the future.

19. Learn more at diagnotes.com
Patient care. Anywhere.