Ashley Trambley, Vanderbilt University Medical Center: Definitely through the initial learnings of the phone call outreach. And we’ve all had this experience. You call somewhere and they say ‘Oh, that’s not our department. Let me transfer you and you get there.’ Well, that’s not our department. Let me transfer you. And by the fifth transfer, you’re irate, you’re done, you’re ready to be finished.
And so that was the experience I did not want for our patients. If you’re going to call me and take time out of your day to respond to this technology that we’ve put in place, I want to be able to answer your question and navigate you.
And with that, if you invite that, that’s what they expect. Otherwise, you’re no better than some of the customer service numbers we call where they reroute you or promise somebody’s going to call you back.
So I really think that’s something that made our team stand out was that commitment to if you’re going to call our kind of general motto is if we don’t know the answer, we’ll find out who does and we’ll take the ownership of getting back to you. Because as a brand, if you can’t navigate your health system, how am I as a patient supposed to figure that out?
Teresa Pinn-Kirkland, Houston Methodist Hospital: The biggest challenge that I think we’re facing now is finding out that we really need to have more coverage. I’m not quite as ambitious enough to say 24-seven yet, but just extended hours, like give me some FTE so that we can cover till like nine or 10 o’clock, Monday through Friday. And skeleton crew on the weekends, like 10 to 6, so that we can address things that are more timely concerns that would affect patient outcomes and revisits and readmissions.
So definitely lots of advantages to starting at one and really honing what you need versus starting wide with a big old net and going, “Oh. We have lots of areas we could improve on.”
