The Issue – Contacting Groups of People at Once

Sudden Office Closure

As practicing obstetricians, there were times when we had to cancel office hours due to a delivery or other emergencies. This sent the staff into a frenzy in which every available staff member grabbed a phone in an effort to contact patients to notify them of the cancellations. This required multiple phone calls because patients were often not home. After several unsuccessful attempts to reach a patient, the staff would generally quit. 

Inclement Weather

As most offices experience, there were times when we were forced to cancel office hours due to severe weather emergencies. When driving was unsafe, we tried to notify staff not to come into the office. Of course, in this situation, patients were not told that the office was closed – we simply hoped they would not venture out in dangerous conditions. 

The SecuReach Solution – Group messaging

• Group messaging allows a single message, “This is Medina County OB-GYN. Dr. Pap had to leave for a delivery and will not be back in the office today. Please call the office to reschedule the appointment.” to be dictated VoIP and sent to each scheduled patient for a particular day. The dialer will continue to call until the message is received by a person, answering machine, or voice mailbox. This frees office staff to do other tasks and not spend time continually on the phone.

• Besides patients being issued a card, each staff member can also be given a card with their own voice mailbox number and security code. When the staff needs to be notified of any office matter, one message can be placed into the system and the staff will be notified by the group message. In the example of an office closing due to weather, a group message could be left by the doctor from home and delivered to all the staff. A similar message could be dictated and sent to all the patients for that day also telling them that the office had been closed. This can all be done from a physician’s home.

• Patients can be assigned into groups (diabetics, pregnant patients, patients on new prescriptions (for research purposes), and messages can be sent to an entire group or groups easily and safely.

• Group messages can be secure (which initiates the tracking system) or unsecured (which are simply messages delivered directly to the patient).