Patient phone calls are a necessity, and a potential liability, which every practice must deal with, but Dr. S. Germain Cassiere said keeping track of calls is no longer a nightmare.
He has created software, called MessageTracker, to make this process easier.
The receptionist application initiates patient call records. When a call comes in, a receptionist fills out a template that appears on her desktop monitor. The call record is then sent to the respective physician, who sends it to the server computer that houses the database tables.
The nurse application contains a call record grid that resembles a spreadsheet, showing calls waiting for responses. A nurse or physician documents the responses in the call record.
Once completed, the call record is marked “done” and is automatically eliminated from the grid, said Dr. Cassiere, an internist who is in group practice in Shreveport, La.
With the exception of those physicians who still want their call records printed out, the entire process is electronic, Dr. Cassiere explained.
“I don't have to worry about lost phone calls, illegible handwriting, delays in getting calls to a nurse, undocumented responses to calls, and not knowing which calls have or have not been answered,” he said.
The system also reduces liability risk associated with missed and unreturned calls.
In addition, any calls logged in a given year or past years can be searched by date or by the name of the patient or physician. “Our practice of six general internists handles 40,000–50,000 calls each year,” he said.
And because MessageTracker can be run without using Microsoft's SQL Server as the database engine, the tracking software adds relatively little to an office's overhead. Instead of the approximately $15,000 cost of the SQL Server and client licenses for his office, Dr. Cassiere's cost for using the Nexus Database System was about $1,000.
“The beauty of it is that I can deploy the software and the server without incurring any license fees, [which] would be the case if I wrote this in Microsoft SQL Server, which would have required that we purchase a separate license for each of the 25 people in our practice,” he explained.
MessageTracker is not currently for sale, but Dr. Cassiere said he's working on an improved version that will be available for purchase.