After Team Members Faint, Practices Rethink Curbside Care

After employees fainted in the heat, a few practices decided to radically rebuild their curbside care.

Changed The Way They Took Histories

Instead of standing in the blazing sun and taking histories through the window of an air-conditioned car, the team at Animal Medical of New City now sends their clients an electronic, fillable form through their website.  The link to the form can be text-messaged to the client as part of their appointment confirmation, emailed, or sent to her when she arrives. Since the form employs conditional logic, the questions change depending on what the patient is there for, so one-sized form fits all.  Animal Medical easily built the form using the WordPress plugin Formidable, but most plugins have a conditional logic option, so any should work.  Once the client finishes the form, she presses ‘submit’ and her answers drop into the email box of the practice’s choice.  If you’re using Cornerstone, these answers populate perfectly into the patient medical record using the copy and paste function of your keyboard.

Two-way Texting Instead of Phone Calls

Instead of phoning the client during every step of the exam, another practice took advantage of VitusVet’s free 60-day trial for two-way texting. Texting is so much faster than dialing and talking; the team can keep multiple chat windows open on desktops; and every client interaction can plop directly into the patient medical chart for consistent documentation. Because it is so much easier and faster than phoning, the team can give the client more updates on how the pet is doing, send cute pictures of the pet while he or she is inside, and reassure the client that things are moving along efficiently.  Two-way texting has been proven to reduce phone traffic by as much as 70% and most people nowadays prefer its convenience and speed to a phone call.  At this practice, this change will be a permanent one.

Skipped The Front Desk Check-in

In the Before Times, the CSR’s were responsible for surveying the lobby and letting the rest of the team know that clients had arrived, but in the Age of COVID, everyone is equally blind to the client’s arrival.  So this team decided to have a technician, not a CSR, monitor the arrival of clients and then be in charge of mobilizing the outpatient appointment team.  Hence, they skipped a whole step of the check-in process.  If you’re still using phones, this team suggests that you have the arriving client call a dedicated phone line; otherwise, ask her to use the two-way text feature upon arrival and your technician will be unobtrusively notified. Putting the technician directly in charge of patient/client intake reduces the risk of dropped communication and cuts down on exam time and phone calls.

Took Payment On Tablets

Companies now make tablets that interface with your software.  One can carry them to the car with the pet, show the client what the invoice looks like, make adjustments if necessary, and collect payment without running back and forth to an inside computer terminal.  You can even manage payment plans on them!  Though the Animal Medical team hasn’t figured out the workflow for it yet, they’re looking forward to a future when text messages are exchanged with clients throughout the visit…and long after! Texting can provide up-to-the-minute notifications on how the pet is doing in treatment, in x-ray, or any other part of the hospital that’s out of the owner’s sight; and then used to stay in touch afterwards, to check on the pet’s general wellbeing, to keep communication channels open, and retain client loyalty. Remember that our online competitors are continually tugging on our clients to build ongoing, virtual relationships with them: through subscriptions, as followers, and by using apps. If we are late to join that dialogue, then by the time we start talking, it may be too late. It’s why BabelVet looks so promising; the company has wisely seen this trend and aims to be at the front of it.

Team Members Recovered

The women that fainted recovered, but how much longer are we going to continue to work ourselves to the point of collapse before we stop, take measure of what and how we are doing things, and start leveraging ingenuity and technology to make our work easier?  I encourage you to explore the ideas presented above, or better still, come up with your own!  You’ve already proven that you are capable of change; now that you’ve had time to somewhat adjust to this radically different world, let’s reevaluate our workflow.  The changes that you make can have a lasting impact on the wellbeing of your team and the service that you provide your clients. On-boarding communication changes like two-way texting aren’t just designed to dazzle, they’re part of a global change in the way all of us prefer to exchange information.