To manage the phones, you need a handful of numbers every month and a way to hear what actually happens on calls. Neither has to be complicated.
The numbers to track
- Total calls and missed calls, including calls that rang out, hit voicemail or hung up on hold.
- New-patient calls versus existing-patient calls. Most of your call volume is existing patients confirming, rescheduling and asking about bills. Blending them together hides how new patients are handled.
- Booking rate on new-patient calls, and the reasons the others didn’t book: price, insurance, no suitable time, just shopping, wrong number.
- Show rate for new-patient appointments, from your practice management software.
- Source: where the caller found you. Ask every new patient and record it.
Call tracking
A call-tracking service gives you separate phone numbers for different sources, such as your Google profile, your website and each ad campaign, and forwards them all to your main line. You can then see how many calls each source produced and when. If you put a tracking number on your Google profile, follow the setup in the Google Business Profile tracking chapter so your listing stays consistent. Many systems also tag calls from first-time callers, which gives you a rough new-patient count even before anyone listens to a recording.
Recording calls: consent rules
Recordings are the most useful training tool a front desk has, but recording a phone call is regulated. Federal law and most states allow recording when one party to the call consents. A number of states require every party to consent, and when a caller is in a different state, the stricter rule may apply. The simple, conservative approach is to play a short notice at the start of every call, such as “calls may be recorded for quality and training,” and to check your state’s rule and any states your callers come from. Ask a healthcare attorney if you’re unsure.
Recordings and HIPAA
Callers routinely mention their name, date of birth, insurance, symptoms and treatment. A recording that contains that information is protected health information, and it needs the same care as a chart:
- Business associate agreement: any vendor that stores your recordings should sign one. If a vendor won’t, choose another.
- Access controls: only the people who review calls should be able to listen, each with their own login.
- Retention: decide how long recordings are kept and make sure they are deleted after that.
- No sharing outside the system: don’t download recordings to personal phones or forward them by regular email or text.
Your practice’s HIPAA policies should cover recordings explicitly. The compliance guides go further; this isn’t legal advice.
A weekly routine
Once a week, pull the list of missed calls and new-patient calls that didn’t book. Make sure every missed caller was called back, listen to a few of the unbooked calls, and note the patterns. That routine feeds the coaching described in training and staffing the front desk.