Continuously Improving For Our Patients

We write you from time to time with exciting updates about advances in eye care, new surgical procedures to improve your vision, our role in the clinical trials process, and more.

Today’s message is a more basic one: how we handle your phone calls. We have been struggling with two communication problems. The first is a phone system that has shown itself to be unreliable, based on days the system does not let callers reach us or does not let us make outbound calls. The second is a dramatic upswing in phone calls. Until about 2020, we were receiving an average of 50 calls an hour, and we believe we responded to each caller in a polite and caring way. Since the start of the pandemic, our call volume has more than doubled. During December, we received an average of 117 calls per hour.

To ensure our patients have the best possible phone experience, we switched to a new phone system. In addition to being supported by a global carrier that gives us many features, including virtual call options and work-from-home choices, they have the resources to offer the support needed to ensure our patients can reach us and we can reach our patients.

The other big change for our phones is that, for the first time in our history, when you call us there will be a short automated menu before you speak with us. Most calls will still be directed to our phone concierges, but this system should allow about 20% of calls to be directed to specific departments, such as our optical shop, contact lenses, or surgery scheduling team. This change to the routing of calls will again allow us to give our callers the undivided attention each deserves.

This differs from organizations you often call that have a fully automated attendant. From 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., we are here with our staff answering your calls. We will instead be using the technology of an automated phone tree menu system as the first step to ensure your call begins in the correct department. Although this will require some changes as we learn how to give our patients the best experience from this system, we believe we will still have only the few calls that end up leaving a message, while almost all calls will be handled by the best staff member.

A point of distinction compared to other healthcare organizations is that the person typically answering your call, our phone concierge, is among the most highly trained staff members in our organization. This group of people underwent almost 400 hours of training before they answered their first call. They have answers to all commonly asked eye care questions, including basic cataract surgery questions, information about eye emergencies, an understanding of eye drops, and more. We believe our phone calls are the front door to our practice, and therefore we owe it to our patients to ensure the people taking our phone calls are highly trained, skilled, compassionate problem solvers.

Finally, our complex appointment schedule, typically based on giving you the best possible eye care (rather than your preferred date or sometimes even doctor), has so far prohibited us from offering online appointment scheduling. While we intend to test online appointment systems in the coming months, our goal is eventually to offer online scheduling as an option for all patient needs and all doctors. However, our plan will be to always have our phone concierges available. In other words, online appointments will be an option, not a requirement.

Thank you for placing your trust in The Doctors of The Eye Care Institute. We sincerely appreciate your confidence and support.

Sincerely,

The Eye Care Institute