Generous support from the community allows JMSCHC to provide food to 60 families in need

Patients and family members, doctors and hospital staff, and other callers were at times frustrated by their inability to get through to Health Center staff by phone... until an interdepartmental team decided to try to fix the problem.

Now that JMSCHC has 6 locations and nearly 170 employees, what the team discovered was that with our growth came an increasingly complex phone system: there were phone extensions that staff did not realize were active; phone calls transferred to the wrong person; and some staff --like nurses-- were overloaded with the number of calls. Patients were on hold for long periods of time and sometimes hung up, doctors from local hospitals couldn't always get through, and the phone set up for this purpose was sometimes used by patients who thought that they could talk to a doctor directly.

The team decided to tackle each problem methodically and creatively. All phone extensions were called to see where they led, and voice mail options were identified that would best serve the patient needs of each department.  The biggest change was the improvement to our automated telephone menu of options for patients calling the Health Center. The team spent hours listening to all the many branches of this telephone tree, listening the way a patient would, and quickly learned there were too many options and layers for patients to clearly understand how to get to where they needed. The team found a way to trim the tree and streamline the messages so that patients were not listening to long messages in Spanish and in English. The words used to describe the different departments were changed to more familiar terms for patients.  All the new messages have been recorded and the new tree has just been introduced. The team will evaluate whether these changes have made a difference for patients before taking their next step.

This fantastic and hard working team is led by operations and quality managers, and includes staff from the IT, front desk, community health, medical assisting, nursing, vision and dental departments.  We are grateful for their vision and commitment to quality and, most importantly, for making it easier for our patients and other important callers to quickly and directly get to the right person by phone.