Tele-ICU white paper from New England Healthcare Institute

This is an interesting white paper I found as part of the American telemedicine site. It reviews the state of Tele-ICU medicine, opportunities and barriers

Setting up phone communications

Q:I will eventually have 2 locations, but I want the phones to be answered at both locations live by a staff member that will stay at the location to answer phones/make appointments.  Any advice on how to set this up so I don’t lose out on making appointments for patients. I know I can forward the numbers to various other numbers. However, that wouldn’t make sense for me either.  Does my dilemma make sense to you?

A: Well, once you start getting into having live humans answering phones at physical locations with unique numbers, you are in a different realm because you end up with the following paradigm:

Local phone number with local phone company at X per month at each location
If no answer after Y rings, phone call is redirected to your Onebox.
Then if you want different onebox message box for each location, you are into the onebox receptionist mode

Easy to setup, but you have to really ask yourself how likely it is that Z percentage of calls coming into those live numbers are ONLY for the purpose you want, and how likely it is that a human will answer the phone as opposed to letting it ring to message center and retrieve messages

As usual, this stuff really takes some planning and realistic expectations. In my strong recommendation, one needs to move to Message Management, not Answering the Phone. You only want a live phone for a scenario where the caller has determined they absolutely MUST have a live person now, or they are answering a page, callback, etc.  And even there you need to assume that the person manning the live phone still will not actually answer the phone, but that the messages left must then trigger a notification to that same person’s cell phone, or whatever that a more urgent msg is waiting.  This is really interesting, it is why it is so important to a develop a little “personal/group” communications project plan!