Vendor Spotlight: TeamHealth Medical Call Center



In today’s world, the rapidly evolving healthcare industry has placed its focus on providing access to high quality, patient-centric care, with an unprecedented emphasis on cost containment and continuum of care. Companies, communities, and medical professionals are challenged with the overwhelming task of balancing quality care with new cost initiatives.

The Need For Call Center Solutions Has Never Been Greater: The TeamHealth Medical Call Center (THMCC) is a premier provider of safe, professional twenty-four-hour medical call center solutions. THMCC provides its client partners with a wide range of cost-effective healthcare services, including:

RN Telephone Triage:

  • Services are branded to each practice with the ability to gather pertinent data and customize a documentation system that allows practices to drive specific directives for both pediatric and adult populations.
  • Another key feature is the ability to integrate patient information into EMRs to meet patient centered medical home and ACO requirements.
  • THMCC registered nurses use Schmitt/Thompson Clinical Content Triage Guidelines for both pediatric and adult populations.
  • Services also include post-triage appointment scheduling and a wide range of post-discharge transitional care initiatives.

Pediatric Triage: Providing high quality pediatric nurse triage requires a special skill set beyond standard care provisions. TeamPeds addresses this need by directing pediatric patients to an RN staff specially trained in pediatric telephone triage.

The TeamPeds program includes:

  • Specialized RN pediatric training and competency testing
  • Ongoing required monthly pediatric in-service requirements for RNs
  • Ability to email care advice
  • Error-free provider on-call system
  • A TeamPeds RN supervisor
  • A pediatric medical director
  • A pediatric QI program

Phone Support: Nurse advice lines and community lines can direct your patient population to the most appropriate level of care while promoting your services. Nurse advice lines can offer branded healthcare and program information that promotes a healthy community and creates an awareness of an organization’s centers of excellence and specialty programs. Their reporting and data collection features also provides you with valuable information about the healthcare needs of your population.

Additional benefits of a THMCC community or nurse advice line include:

  • Readmission prevention and appropriate care utilization
  • Patient acquisition
  • Revenue reconciliation reporting
  • Branded EXITcare or customized health information emailed to callers
  • Web-based branded online self-triage program
  • Appointment scheduling
  • Physician referrals

A dedicated ED nurse advice line or triage service helps hospitals respond to calls from patients with inquiries concerning their need for emergency care. THMCC ED nurse advice and triage line services:

  • Offers access for callers questioning their need for an ED visit
  • Promotes appropriate ED utilization
  • Prevents unnecessary readmissions
  • Provides opportunity to refer other services within system
  • Eliminates the risk of ED handling clinical questions
  • Allows clinical ED staff to stay focused on in-house patient care
  • Refers all real-time call records on callers to the ED

Transitional Care: In many cases, the provision of care is not complete when the patient visit or hospital stay ends. THMCC partners with healthcare providers to develop relationships with patients that support care plan compliance long after they return home.

Transitional care management means preparing patients for their first visit and then accompanying them through post-visit follow-up and post-hospital care. THMCC’s post-discharge call-back services are fully customizable to the needs of specific patient populations. Services include:

  • Outbound daily call campaigns for both clinical and non-clinical populations
  • Specialized scripting utilized for high-risk patients
  • Inpatient and ED patient population coverage
  • EMR access availability
  • All calls performed twenty-four to forty-eight hours post-discharge
  • Optional callback line for patients experiencing symptoms

The value of these transitional care efforts can be measured in the following ROI areas:

  • Readmission prevention
  • Rise in HCAHPS scores
  • Improvement in daily escalations or interventions
  • Enhanced monthly reporting, such as core indicator analysis (medications, discharge instructions, and follow-up appointments), positive or negative trending items, recognition, and patient satisfaction

Avoidable readmissions are a major financial problem for the nation’s healthcare system. For patients, hospitalizations alone are stressful, even more so when they result in readmissions.

THMCC’s outbound call campaign services are specifically designed for high-risk patients. This includes:

  • Initial post-discharge call within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, with an additional four calls at weekly intervals
  • Assessment of patient’s understanding and compliance for medication, discharge instructions, follow-up appointments, and current symptoms
  • Optional callback line for patients experiencing symptoms

Physician Answering Services: With ever-increasing workloads and patient care responsibilities, physician burnout is a real concern for hospitals, healthcare organizations, and private practices. The stress of a work/life imbalance can lower physician job satisfaction and hinder physician recruitment.

Delegating the workload to a specialized team of medical professionals can significantly reduce physician burnout. They realize that to take care of your patients, you must first take care of your providers. Partnering with the TeamHealth Medical Call Center and their staff of telephone triage RNs can provide the proper work/life balance for your physicians, which in turn, will mean the best possible care for your patients.

THMCC offers physician and practice answering services to provide seamless access for clinical and non-clinical calls. Patient coordinators deliver a high level of customer service and are supervised by an RN.

Features include:

  • After hours, daytime support or 24/7 options
  • Emergency backup for unscheduled closures
  • High volume overflow
  • Translation services
  • Branded services, including customized scripting, directives, and protocols
  • Error-free paging system
  • Secure electronic messaging through TeamDoc Mobile, a web-based application
  • All calls recorded
  • Robust reporting

Consulting Services: Another area of business focused on the call center industry is their consulting services, which can help organizations implement cost containment and provide high quality to new or existing call center services.

Their consulting team is led by vice president of strategic clinical solutions, Gina Tabone, MSN, RNC. Gina came to THMCC after spending nineteen years with Cleveland Clinic’s world-renown Nurse on Call program.

During that time, Tabone served as triage nurse, senior resource nurse, education and protocol specialist, manager, and ultimately administrator. Under her direction as administrator, ED utilization declined, continuous care coordination improved, performance metric targets dropped from 33 percent ABD to less than 5 percent, URAC accreditation was achieved, and the call center grew from covering 350 physicians to the integration of more than 1,500 employed and affiliated providers.

It is this breadth of operational and administrative experience, along with being an industry thought leader that makes Tabone an invaluable resource and distinguished leader for THMCC.

In her role as vice president, Gina partners with organizations to fine-tune and optimize operational and clinical performance, as well as supporting organizations that want to improve their own in-house medical call centers, ensuring processes are aligned, and contributing to overall goals and strategies. She conducts on-site, comprehensive assessments that identify strengths while pinpointing areas of opportunity for improvement.

Some considerations include:

  • Workforce Management: Are you utilizing your human resources to exceed customer satisfaction? Have you deployed remote staffing?
  • Post-Acute Care Outbound Call Initiatives: Hospital discharges, outpatient procedures, ED visits, and wellness checks.
  • Managed Care and Population Health: Does your care coordination model address care gaps? Have you been able to reduce unnecessary ED utilization? How does your organization move from a culture of acute to preventative care? Is your organization positioned to accommodate planned and unexpected growth opportunities?
  • Hospital Readmission Penalty Prevention: Acute MI, CHF, pneumonia, total knee, total hip, and COPD
  • Key Goals: Are you on target to achieve the goals of the triple aim?
  • Attract, Hire, and Train Caregivers for Success
  • Current Technological Capabilities: Are you achieving first call resolution? Does it drive intelligent data that reflects your call center’s value? What self-service tools will eliminate unnecessary calls to your nurses?
  • Quality Assurance: Does your quality program provide meaningful data?

Creating Successful, Long-Term Client Relationships Is Their Goal: The TeamHealth Medical Call Center enters into true partnerships with clients to provide individual service offerings, with measurable results, and to develop a long-term relationship. Their technology allows them to meet the needs of the changing healthcare industry while they continue to make the patient experience their primary focus.

Founded by a team of physicians more than twenty-one years ago, the THMCC has the unique advantage of having a provider perspective in each aspect of the services they provide. They understand the special bond between physician and patient. Like their clients, they value each caller as an individual who deserves a clinically correct and caring response from their staff to ensure a positive experience, which adds value to their relationship with their clients. With more than twenty-one years of experience and ten million triage calls, the TeamHealth Medical Call Center’s medical call center solutions can serve a vital role in your patient care coordination efforts. Call 888-203-1118 or visit them online at www.teamhealthcallcenter.com to learn more.