Specialty
ECW PLAYBOOKSurgery Center Phone Coordination
How surgery centers and surgical practices on eClinicalWorks handle arrival, clearance and post-op calls without tying up pre-op nurses.
Ready in
One to three days
Typical ECW integration timeline
Automation lift
Varies
Depends on call mix and workflow scope
Escalations
On-call
Response times follow your protocols
The calls around a surgical day
Most phone traffic at a surgery center is not about booking a case. It is patients asking where to park, whether their ride can wait inside, whether they can take their morning pills, and family members asking when to pick someone up. Surgeons' offices call about schedule changes. Clearing physicians' offices call to say a clearance was faxed.
Pre-op nurses end up answering logistics between chart reviews, which is the least efficient use of a nurse and the most likely way for a clinical question to wait.
Sorting logistics from clinical questions
Logistics your center approves can be answered on the call. Anything clinical, however minor it sounds, goes to clinical staff.
Write the logistics answers down once, in the words your center already uses on its instruction sheets. Patients then hear the same answer on the phone that they read on paper.
- General arrival instructions and location: answered from what your center provides
- Parking, ride and visitor rules: answered
- Medication, fasting or symptom questions: routed to the pre-op nurse
- Calls from surgeons' offices: transferred to scheduling while open
- Clearance and paperwork status: recorded for the coordinator
Post-op calls
After surgery the calls change: pain, swelling, dressing questions, the post-op visit date. Katie does not assess any of them. Symptom calls follow your escalation rules, with an urgent mark when the caller describes something your surgeons have put on the urgent list.
Post-op visits can be booked directly into eClinicalWorks under your rules, with the operating surgeon or the team member your rules name.
Documentation for the case
Each call ends in a structured summary. With MedReception Autopilot, it is filed to the patient's chart in eClinicalWorks from a staff member's own signed-in browser, so the record of the clearance call or the post-op question sits with the case.
That matters when a case is cancelled on the day: the team can see which calls came in beforehand and what was asked, rather than reconstructing it from memory.
It also helps the surgeon's office. When the surgeon asks whether the patient called with concerns before the case, the answer is in the chart.
The night before
The evening before a procedure is when patients get nervous and call. Is the time still right? Can they bring their daughter? What if they have a cold? Those calls used to reach an answering service or a full mailbox. Now they are answered, logistics are handled on the spot, and anything clinical, such as the cold, is escalated under your rules so a nurse can decide whether the case should go ahead.
Frequently asked questions
- Can Katie tell patients their arrival time?
- She can share general arrival instructions your center provides. Patient-specific times come from your staff, and Katie records the question if the caller needs one.
- Who answers whether a patient can take medication before surgery?
- Your clinical staff. Katie never gives medication instructions; she records the question and escalates it under your rules.
- Can we use MedReception AI only for after-hours calls?
- Yes. Some centers start with evenings and weekends, when pre-op questions otherwise go to an answering service, and expand later.
- What about calls from the anesthesia team or the hospital?
- Professional callers can be identified early and transferred to the person you choose while you are open, with their message captured in full after hours.
Next step
Bring this playbook into your ECW environment
We’ll load your scripts, routing maps, and compliance requirements into MedReception AI, then show your stakeholders how each call is logged back into ECW.