VA hospitals and clinics in Middle Tennessee are trying to attack their patient backlog by more efficiently handling phone calls. The Tennessee Valley Health Care system has established a central call center, which handles as many as 35,000 calls a month.
The VA admits that veterans have been spending way too long on hold and navigating phone systems. This shows up in patient satisfaction feedback. So the main job of the call center,
which includes a staff of 20 clerks and additional nurses, is to answer incoming calls within 30 seconds and ideally resolve the issue on the spot — like refilling a prescription.
“This, to me, is one of the most important things that needed to be done for the Tennessee Valley VA,” says Martin Howard, who oversees outpatient operations.
Rerouting inbound calls from the clinics to a central answering center and even taking over some of the outbound call duties should give patients a better experience and free up doctors and nurses, he says.
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“So you’re taking time off of their time that they would have had calling patients back or talking to patients on the phone,” he says. “They can now dedicate that time to actually seeing patients.”
So far, the VA has had
mixed success trying to cut wait times for appointments simply by adding staff or allowing veterans to find alternative care in non-VA facilities.
Wait times for a new patient to schedule an appointment have fallen to nine days for Nashville’s medical center. But the Murfreesboro campus is at more than two weeks. Clarksville’s
recently expanded clinic is currently a month out.
The hope is that a call center will not only give clinicians more time to see patients, but also quickly fill slots for no-shows or reschedule appointments when necessary.
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