Practice Guideline for Telephone Call Capture

INCOMING MESSAGES

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Answering Service

• Physicians complete a message card (with sticky backing to place in chart) for incoming patient calls.
• The next day, the covering on-call physician notifies the patient’s own physician regarding calls received, and the completed message cards are signed off by that physician and placed in the chart (or scanned into EMR).
• Each morning, the service faxes over all calls taken the night before for the on-call physician to sign-off.
• Patient appointments and cancellations are addressed prior to the start of routine hours.
• Answering service call logs are maintained for 7 years.
• All copies of the provider on call cards from or for covering practices are faxed over to their office each day to reconcile with their answering service calls. Hard copies of patient cards are sent interoffice same day.
• Additional hard copies of cards are kept for 3 months under separate cover for audit purposes and/or cards that go missing.

Messages during the hours of operation

• Calls are received and written down/entered in EMR by front office in real time. If three-part carbon phone message log is used, copies of carbon must be kept for 7 years.
• All clinical calls are directed to clinical staff with the record. Non clinical calls are handled by front office.
• Clinical calls are triaged by licensed staff. Depending on the nature/urgency of the call, – chart goes to provider, triage nurse or routine call back bins.
• Calls, which may facilitate a possible written response from above clinical person, are taped to a progress sheet for provider/nurse use and placed in chart.
• Response to patient is documented-date, time, title.
• Physician acknowledgement as appropriate must be documented.

Message Audits:

Audits should be performed once a month. Charts are pulled at random per MD from the answering service logs and day messages to assure quality control is in place.