In acute and emergency care, availability is not a service quality — it is part of the clinical outcome. Minutes decide things. A patient who cannot reach anyone, or a referring physician who cannot get a burn patient scheduled, is a delay with consequences attached.
This is how Answering365 worked with Temple University Hospital Burn Center on the scheduling side of that problem.
The organization
The Temple University Burn Center is part of the Temple University Hospital System. It is a Level 1 trauma center, the Philadelphia region's only burn center, and the only burn facility in the region affiliated with an academic medical center. It is verified by the American Burn Association and the American College of Surgeons.
The center provides both high-level trauma care and outpatient treatment for less severe burns. Regardless of the severity of an injury, all patients are given the highest priority to be seen by a Burn Center Specialist.
The challenge
The most pressing issue was coverage for 24/7 patient scheduling. The center's calls arrive from three quite different sources, each with different needs:
- Individual patients, who may be distressed, in pain, and unsure how serious their injury is.
- Referring physicians, arranging care for a patient already under assessment elsewhere.
- Area emergency trauma centers, coordinating transfers where timing is clinical.
The center wanted all of those calls answered by a live individual who could schedule patients appropriately and escalate where needed — not routed to a recording and not held until office hours.
There is a particular reason a live voice matters with burns. A person who has just been burned frequently cannot judge the severity themselves, and often needs to speak to someone in order to work out whether this is a hospital journey right now or an outpatient appointment tomorrow. That conversation cannot happen with a voicemail box.
The solution
Answering365 partnered with Dr. William B. Hughes, Medical Director of the Temple University Burn Center, to establish the right arrangement for the center's patient contact.
Answering365's operators took over answering the center's office calls on a 24/7 basis, scheduling more than 30 appointments each day using the center's existing software. Operators also handle the center's after-hours operational calls.
Two details in that are worth drawing out. The first is that scheduling happens in the center's own system rather than as a request passed back for staff to enter later — which is what keeps the appointment book accurate and prevents double-booking. The second is that the arrangement covers routine operational calls as well as patient scheduling, so the center's staff are not pulled back to the phone for administrative traffic during clinical work.
The outcome
The center has continuous live coverage for patient scheduling, with calls from patients, referring physicians, and regional trauma centers all reaching a person who can act — booking into the existing system directly, and escalating where a call needs clinical attention rather than an appointment.
What made it work
Handling calls for a specialist clinical unit puts a few requirements above the usual ones:
- 1Operators trained in medical terminology, so information reaching clinicians is accurate.
- 2Direct scheduling into the center's existing software, rather than message-taking with a transcription step behind it.
- 3A clear escalation path for calls that need clinical attention immediately, defined by the center rather than assumed by the service.
- 4Full HIPAA compliance in how calls are handled, recorded, stored, and accessed.
- 5Bilingual operators, since a patient describing a burn should not also be translating.
The clinical boundary is the part that has to hold. Operators schedule and route against protocols the center's clinicians wrote. They do not assess burn severity or advise a caller on treatment — that judgment stays with clinical staff, which is exactly what the escalation path exists to reach.
About Answering365
Answering365 is a US-based, award-winning answering service employing trained call operators for medical accounts. Services can be customized to a provider's specific needs: appointment scheduling and reminder calls, medical dispatch, medical records data entry, and clinical trial sign-ups. Operators act as an extension of the practice, so callers are not conscious of having reached an outside service.
Our processes and systems are fully HIPAA compliant, and our technology can either schedule appointments directly or integrate with a provider's existing system.
Why specialist units are a hard scheduling problem
A regional specialist center sits at the end of other people's referral paths, which changes the character of its inbound calls. Much of the volume comes from other clinicians who need something arranged now, and who are themselves mid-shift with a patient waiting.
That produces two competing demands on the same phone line. A referring physician wants a fast, precise, professional exchange. A patient who has just been burned wants time, patience, and someone unhurried. A single script cannot serve both, which is why the classification at the start of the call matters as much as anything that follows.
What other specialist units can take from this
The pattern generalizes well beyond burns. Any unit that takes referrals from across a region, treats both acute and outpatient cases, and cannot let a scheduling call wait until morning faces the same problem: the phone is a clinical pathway, and staffing it with people who are also delivering care means one of the two suffers.
- Write down the caller types explicitly, since each needs a different opening and a different route.
- Decide in advance which calls are scheduled and which are escalated, and make the boundary unambiguous.
- Insist on direct booking into the system clinicians already use, so the appointment book is never behind.
- Name the failure path, because the arrangement is judged on the night the first contact does not answer.
Read more about our medical answering services, appointment setting, and clinical trials support. For a customized quote, call 888-588-9800 or get in touch.
