Chris Kresser: We use a VirtualPBX system. It’s called RingCentral. We’re going to be talking about this later in the course. A PBX system, if you don’t know what that is, if you’ve ever called a big company or any company, usually there’s a recording that says, Hi. You’ve reached AT&T. If you want to talk to customer service, press 1. If you want to talk to sales, press 2. Blah, blah, blah. That’s a PBX system. It just routes the call to the appropriate person. In the past or even today when there’s a physical office environment, sometimes those systems are installed on site at the office itself, but now the more kind of modern version of that is that all happens in the cloud. For a virtual distributed company where employees are all over the place, that makes a lot more sense. So if someone calls our office, they hear initial records. You’ve reached California Center for Functional Medicine. If you’re a lab calling with questions, press 1. If you’re a patient calling and you have questions, press 2. Like that. And then when they press the extension, that gets routed to the appropriate phone number, and you can set that all up in RingCentral, where you can have it ring a cell number or a landline. You can have it ring a series of numbers in sequence. You can set up hours for when it’s supposed to ring those numbers. It has a lot of power and flexibility. There are a number of different options, but RingCentral is the one that we first started using and have stuck with even though we’ve evaluated some other systems along the way.
So, no, someone does not always answer our phone. In fact, it’s more typical that someone does not answer, but we did recently start instituting phone hours where someone will answer the phone. There’s maybe two to four hours a few days a week that a patient can call and get a live person on the phone. And again, this is made possible by automating other parts of the admin procedures so that the staff has some time to do that.
As for the question, “Do you correspond directly with patients outside of appointment times?” the answer to that is no, and in general, I would recommend that you do not do that unless you’re billing for that time. Otherwise, that can quickly get out of control. I have hundreds of patients that are in some phase of a treatment plan, some who are relatively inactive and some who are relatively active, and if I was picking up the phone and calling patients outside of appointment times, I would never sleep or eat or be able to do anything else. If a patient needs support in between appointments, they can submit a message through the portal. If they need support that is above and beyond what they can get in the portal, they can schedule an appointment. We have faced a challenge where we have such a long wait for established patients to set up an appointment that we are in need of a solution for that situation where a patient needs more support than they can get through the portal and they actually can’t schedule an appointment quickly to get that support. So what we’re planning to do, and you may have already seen these advertisements that have been out there, we’re going to hire a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant, and one of their primary roles is going to be to be available to patients for that kind of in-between-appointment support. You will likely not be able to do that initially just because of financial reasons. Your practice has to mature to the point where you can afford to hire that person, but it’s certainly a possibility and a good solution once you’ve gotten to that point.