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Discharge Phone Calls (Patient Callbacks) and Patient Satisfaction Solution

• Promptly recognize a change in patient condition
• Uncover patients’ concerns before formal complaints occur
• Collect accurate and timely patient satisfaction data
• Give your staff prompt feedback on their performance
• Rapidly improve your patient satisfaction scores
• Minimize complaints, claims, lawsuits, and payouts
• Enhance your emergency department’s reputation and outperform competitors

EmEx-Contact is a turnkey solution for your emergency department patient callback and satisfaction survey program. Our trained call center team, using our patient callback software in a secure environment, will contact and track your emergency department patients soon after discharge. Alternatively, you may lease our discharge phone call software if you prefer to use your own staff. We inquire about changes in the patient’s condition, whether aftercare instructions are understood, and if there were any impediments to follow-up. Any patient care issues are immediately forwarded to the emergency department. In addition, we collect patient satisfaction data and obtain specific feedback on the emergency department experience and provider performance. We can also provide patient satisfaction data and feedback on the inpatient experience.

It takes significant time without interruptions to perform great discharge phone calls, so adding this responsibility to doctors and nurses that are actively working in the clinical area is unlikely to be successful. Economies of scale and a significant investment in technology allow us to provide EmEx-Contact at an affordable price. We can reduce the expense of internal callback programs and eliminate the hassle of hiring, training, and supervising staff (we also offer a software-only solution for emergency departments that prefer to utilize their own internal staff with our value-added services). As an added benefit, we will benchmark your data to other participating emergency departments. In addition, your hospital can enjoy a positive financial return on its investment with an increasing emergency department census, less time-consuming patient complaints, and less professional liability claims and costs.

EmEx-Contact offers significant benefits for your emergency department:

Acquire accurate and timely patient satisfaction feedback

Each patient contacted is asked to rate their overall emergency department experience, the performance of their emergency nurse and physician, and to provide specific comments. This information is aggregated, benchmarked, and made available in detailed reports. Specific reports can be viewed for each individual physician and nurse. We also offer flexible email notifications to the individuals you designate (as well as the physician and nurse who saw the patient) for feedback on patient care and patient satisfaction. We can even send each physician and nurse a summary of the day’s discharge phone call results for all of the patients that they personally cared for.

Our call center patient satisfaction data offers increased accuracy compared to traditional mailed surveys, as our phone surveys offer:

• Much larger sample size (expect callback completion rates of two-thirds)
• Short lag before patient contact (patients typically surveyed 1-2 days after discharge)
• Eliminate selection bias (a non-representative minority usually mail back surveys)

Improve patient care and decrease liability risk

Patient callbacks improve clinical care, as a patient whose condition is worsening is directed to return to the emergency department before a potential bad outcome occurs. EmEx faxes a report of the situation to the emergency department so that your staff is aware a patient was instructed to return. Patients with specific concerns or who do not understand discharge instructions are channeled to a designated person in your emergency department.
In addition, following any malpractice claim, if the patient was reached by the callback clerk, the extracted data from the day after discharge will either (1) confirm patient was satisfied with the emergency department visit, had a stable or improved condition, and had a follow-up plan or (2) confirm that the patient was instructed to follow-up closely with their physician or return immediately return to the emergency department. Having this information clearly documented can eliminate or significantly reduce any payout.

Build goodwill and reduce patient complaints

A patient receiving a discharge phone call usually appreciates the well-being check and the opportunity to give feedback on their experience. This goodwill reflects well on your emergency department’s reputation, and the callback itself may help to raise satisfaction scores.
Callbacks are also useful for service recovery as concerns can be promptly addressed and issues resolved before they lead to more formal complaints or litigation.

Improve quality and performance

Regularly engaging a large subset of your patients allows your emergency department to recognize what it is doing well and what needs improvement. This is why patient callbacks are a recommended best practice by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: http://www.rwjf.org/pr/product.jsp?id=29982