Post-call Confirmations

The repeat call nobody needed

A patient books by phone, hangs up, and an hour later is not sure whether it was Tuesday or Thursday. So they call again. At many practices, part of each week's phone volume is people checking on calls they already made.

Confirmation is cheap insurance against that. It has two parts: what is said before the call ends, and what the patient has in writing afterward. Each catches a different kind of mistake.

On the call: read it back

Before hanging up, Katie restates the outcome. For a booking, that is the date, time, provider and office. For a message, it is who will receive it and what happens next. The caller can correct anything while it is still easy to fix.

The read-back catches the errors that cause the most trouble later: the wrong office in a multi-site group, a morning slot when the patient meant afternoon, or a message intended for the nurse that the caller thought was going to the physician.

After the call: a short text

Once your practice number is registered for patient text messages, which takes about five days during setup, a caller can receive a text after the call. For a booked appointment it states the practice, date and time. For other calls it lets the caller know the request reached the practice.

Keep the texts plain. Diagnoses, test results and medication names do not belong in a text message, and a confirmation does not need them to do its job.

• The practice name, so the message is recognizable
• The date and time, for bookings
• How to reach the office to change anything
• No clinical details

What staff see from the same call

The same call produces a structured summary for your team, so the front desk and the patient are working from the same version of events. A booked visit already sits on the eClinicalWorks schedule, and with MedReception Autopilot the summary can also be filed to the patient's chart.

When a patient later says they were told something different, staff can check the summary instead of relying on memory.

Confirmation as a trust signal

For a patient calling a practice for the first time, a prompt confirmation is often the first evidence that the practice is organized. It costs nothing at the visit and sets the tone for everything after it. For an established patient, it is simply one less thing to worry about.

Practices that already send confirmations from other systems should check the overlap during setup, so a patient does not receive two slightly different messages about the same booking.