Chris Kresser: I think I mentioned this in the Q&A, but we, for many years, didn’t have anyone answering the phone at all, and then we recently switched to a kind of office hours situation where we have someone answering the phone for six hours a week. That’s a service that we wanted to primarily provide for existing patients if they needed some clarification or support in between appointments or for administrative matters, billing, etc. Sometimes it’s easier—and quicker and more efficient—to resolve those things with a quick phone call than it is to go back and forth with portal messages, so we wanted to give patients and the staff an opportunity to have those conversations rather than going back and forth with portal messages.
Then there are just some patients who are considering joining the practice who want to talk to someone on the phone. We haven’t made that possibility available as a rule up until now, and it has worked perfectly fine, but I think it depends on your situation. You have to remember that most patients who come to see me are people that have been following my blog and my podcast and maybe seen me speak at an event or something or they’ve read my book, and because of that, they feel like they know me and they have already a sense of a relationship, and so they’re willing to sign up to become a patient without talking to anybody and just doing it totally electronically. If you are not cultivating that kind of relationship with patients prior to enrolling them in your practice … I mean, certainly Evergreen and the work that Keith is having you do is advocating for that, but if at this point that’s not happening, it may be a good idea to give people an opportunity to talk to someone before they become a new patient. You just have to weigh the various pros and cons here. The pro is that, I think, especially for a certain group of people, can make it more likely that someone is actually going to sign up, if they have a good experience talking with someone on your staff. The downside is you’re obviously paying for that person to answer the phone and for that time, so it may be that that’s something that you offer later on when you have more resources, which is how it happened with us.