A telecom engineer came to the rescue when a glitch in the automated phone system was discovered that was causing some patients at American Fork Hospital to wait on hold for up to an hour when calling to place a meal order.
Ann-Marie Shirley
Ann-Marie Shirley, patient meal lead dietitian in Nutrition Services, learned of the problem from a cook at the hospital. “The cook was very distraught because she didn’t feel like we were doing the best thing for our patients. Some were waiting on hold for a very long time,” she says.
Ann-Marie also received similar concerns about wait times associated with this hospital from local and systemwide administrators, but she couldn’t see any wait times longer than five minutes in the reports for the overflow call center.
She continued to ask questions between her group and the local American Fork Hospital call center and then reached out to Douglas Gilmore, a senior telecom technician at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, who was helping her with adjustments to the overflow call center.
Douglas Gilmore
“The call center in American Fork wasn’t routing to the overflow like it should have, and that’s what I noticed when I logged into the system,” Douglas says. “When I looked at it, I didn’t see what I like to refer to as fail safes. If there wasn’t somebody logged in or if there was a power failure, it should route the call back to another group to be able to handle it. The programming portion for it wasn’t set-up. The page was just blank.”
The blank phone tree didn’t route the caller to any destination. Since the callers didn’t hear music or an announcement, many stayed on the line for long periods of time waiting for their calls to be answered.
“Because it was a problem for patients I went ahead and programmed the changes to have that failsafe in place,” Douglas says.
Shortly after the problem was resolved, a comparison of reports at the hospital call center from the days before and after the fix showed substantial improvement, Douglas says.
“I’m grateful this was escalated so we—really Douglas—could find and fix some of these underlying issues,” Ann-Marie says. “I’m so saddened that the patients had to be part of our finding these issues. But if the patients hadn’t said anything, we wouldn’t have looked into it. The cook at American Fork, the nurse manager, and the administrator—all of those people who were bringing up concerns to help dig down deeper—were all part of the solution as well.”
“It’s great to work with people like Douglas who go above and beyond, even though they think it’s something little,” she says.
“This was a very minor thing to set-up; it took me a matter of minutes. You never know how something so small could make such a big difference,” Douglas says.