Last Thursday my friend had an appointment with his doctor at 7:30pm. My friend usually runs late, so I wasn’t surprised when he abruptly ended our phone call in order to call his doctor to report he was running late.
He called the doctor’s office only to be informed that the office was closed for the night. At his insistence, the call center operator dialed a private line within the office and learned that my friend indeed had an appointment that evening at 7:30. How could the call center not be aware of this practice nuance?
Many medical practices make a distinction between phone hours and what I’ll refer to as ‘patient’ hours. Phone hours are typically 9-5 or some relative variant that relates directly and specifically to phone staff availability to answer the phones, while ‘patient’ hours relate to in-office patient scheduling.
In my friend’s situation, the doctor’s office staff works from 9-5. At 5pm much of the administrative staff leaves for the day. There is insufficient staff to both handle office duties as well as answer the phone. As a result, phone calls are routed to a call center (either live or automated). Of course, those calls are processed as if the ‘office is closed’ condition is met. When we refer to ‘office is closed’ scenario, we are referring to the method in which calls are processed after hours, when theoretically, no one is in the office. Which by the way, is not always the case as we see here.
This concept of office hours is a holdover from the ‘good old days’ when the doctor’s office redirected the calls to the answering service for the night.
The reality is that medical practices are much more nuanced than in the ‘good old days’. Patients and practices are much more sophisticated, but more often than not, we find that the supporting service and technology doesn’t match up. Call centers (both automatic as well as live) should discriminate between office phone hours and office patient hours. It’s that time when the office is both open and closed.
