Veracity Post-Visit Patient Calls

What happens after the patient leaves

A visit does not end at checkout. That evening the patient realizes they forgot to ask whether they can exercise. The next day the pharmacy says the new prescription needs a prior authorization. Later a statement arrives that does not match what they expected, or a parent finds the school form was never filled in. Each of these becomes a phone call to your office.

Post-visit calls compete with everything else at the front desk, and they often need someone other than the receptionist to answer them.

Sorting the after-visit questions

Katie answers, works out what kind of call it is, and records it for the right owner under your rules.

A single post-visit call often touches several of these at once. The summary lists each request, so the nurse handles the medication question and the scheduler books the follow-up without either one passing a message along.

• Questions about the visit or the treatment plan go to clinical staff
• Prescription problems go to the nurse or provider team
• Missing paperwork or a work note goes to the staff who handle forms
• Billing surprises go to the billing office
• Requests to book the follow-up the provider asked for go to the scheduler

Clinical questions stay with clinicians

Many post-visit questions sound simple and are not. Can I take this with my other medication? Is this swelling normal? Should I still go to physical therapy? Katie answers none of them. She records the question, the visit it relates to and anything the patient describes that your escalation rules treat as urgent, and clinical staff respond.

Your clinicians stay in control of the advice the patient receives, and the nurse returning the call already knows what was asked.

After in-office procedures

Practices that perform in-office procedures field a particular kind of post-visit call: a patient with bleeding, pain or fever after a biopsy, an injection or a minor surgery. Your escalation rules decide how these are handled, during office hours and after them. Annie answers the ones that come in at night, and those your rules mark as urgent follow the path your clinicians defined.

Writing these rules with your proceduralists in advance means the patient who calls with a concern late on a Friday gets the same handling as one who calls on a Tuesday morning, decided by the people who performed the procedure.

The half that calls you

Post-visit follow-up is sometimes understood as the practice calling patients. This page covers the other half, the patients calling you, which is the half most likely to reach voicemail when the desk is busy.

Any outreach your nurses already do continues as before. When a patient returns a nurse's call and the nurse is with another patient, Katie answers and writes up what the patient said, so the nurse does not have to start the conversation over.