As a neurologist, practicing for over 20 years, I found myself frustrated with the way we handle communication in healthcare.
When I left residency and went into practice, like most, I was carrying a pager and receiving messages through a live-operator answering service. A decade later, nothing had changed.
It started out with small annoyances. I was getting tired of being woken up in the middle of the night due to answering service operators dispatching messages to the wrong physicians. I was suffering frequent calls when I was off-duty — calls that disturbed time with my family.
Even if the answering service managed to deliver the message to the right physician, the content was often inaccurate, as the live operators were not medically trained — and ended up causing confusion and further frustration for myself and others in my practice.
Further, I was dealing with extended hold times and “phone tag” when returning calls from nurses at the hospital. And I wasn’t just complaining about being on hold because it was annoying — these things were delaying patient care. Worse still, the majority of these delayed communications only required a one-word confirmation and did not warrant a time-consuming phone call in the first place.
The breaking point for me came when the answering service starting negatively affecting patient care. In our busy neurology practice, we found ourselves spending more time on hold, playing phone tag with nurses, and trying to track down messages that had gone to the wrong place, than with our patients.
I knew there had to be a better way.
So I started doing some research into how we could handle our communication with more modern technology, like smart-phones, got an awesome team together, and began to brainstorm “the better way.”
A few years later, after blood, sweat, tears, and a lot of coffee, BeckonCall was born. My clinical communication is now immediate, lost and delayed messages have been eliminated, and I get to spend more time with my patients and family.
We now have hundreds of physicians and practice managers using BeckonCall and we aren’t stopping there. It has helped my practice become more profitable through increased throughput, better patient satisfaction, and decreased monthly costs and I’m glad we can do the same for so many others.
I’m passionate about building technology that fits into a doctor’s workflow and allows us an easier way to do what we do best: providing great care to our patients.
Simplifying the way healthcare communication has been handled for decades is a big task — especially as, we as physicians, are naturally suspicious of technology solutions (we’ve all dealt with clunky EMRs), but I believe that with the right solutions, we can fundamentally simplify healthcare.
I’d love for you to join me and BeckonCall in our mission to build technology that gives doctors their time back and helps them to provide the best quality of care possible to their patients.
We’re happy to have you here.
— Dr. Jeffrey Becker
P.S. If you’re as frustrated with your answering service as I was, I invite you to sign up for a demo of BeckonCall today. In just a few minutes, our team will show you how much easier clinical communication can be.
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