Pre-Operative Instructions
Prep and fasting questions land the night before an early start. Answer them from your own written instructions and route the ones that need a surgeon.
A patient starting a split-dose preparation at eight in the evening for a seven-thirty start has questions at an hour when the office is dark. Voicemail is not coverage for that call, and the fallback is often the surgeon's personal mobile number, which is not a system.
Pre-operative instructions differ by surgeon, by facility and by operation. The system reads back the document you supplied for that pathway rather than generic advice, and where a question falls outside your document it says so and routes it instead of filling the gap.
Surgical schedules are built around allocated operating room block time, and a case that comes off the board the morning of surgery is far harder to backfill than a cancelled clinic appointment. A question answered correctly at nine the night before is a different economic event from the same question unanswered.
Whether to take the apixaban, whether to halve the insulin, what to do about a GLP-1 agonist: these are clinical decisions with facility and anaesthesia implications. The system captures the medication, the dose, the last dose taken and the question, and routes it to the person your protocol names.
24/7 coverage
The night-before window is covered, including the weekend before a Monday start
Read from your own instructions
Prep and fasting answers come from your document, not from generic guidance
Unlimited concurrent calls
Several patients prepping for tomorrow's board can call at once without a queue
Only where your own written instructions say so, and in your wording. Any question your document does not cover, including a caller describing that they cannot keep the solution down, is captured and routed to the contact your protocol names rather than answered.
They route. The system records the drug, the dose, when the last dose was taken and what the patient is asking, then hands it to your named contact. It does not give a hold instruction, because that decision belongs to the surgeon, the prescriber or the anaesthesia team.
Where a scheduling integration is live it can read back the arrival time on record. Otherwise it captures the question and routes it, because a wrong arrival time either delays a first case or leaves a fasting patient sitting in a waiting room for hours.
Never. It does not tell a patient the operation is off, on, or moving. If your protocol defines a branch that must reach the on-call surgeon that night, the call is escalated on your rota with the escalation attempts timestamped.
Calls are handled in dozens of languages, which matters most here because a mistranslated fasting or bowel-prep instruction is the kind of error that gets discovered at the front desk on the morning of surgery.
As a structured note carrying identifiers, the scheduled procedure and date, what was asked, what was read back, what was routed and the timestamps. Delivery into an EMR task queue is available through API or FHIR for supported systems.
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Abdominal Symptom Calls in a Surgical Practice
The pre-operative patient who calls about symptoms rather than about the prep.
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After-Hours Coverage for Surgical Practices
Where the nine p.m. prep call goes when your protocol says it needs a surgeon tonight.
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The same patient, a week later, on the other side of the operation.
Pillar guide
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