Customer Profiles
Dr. Ed Knights, Internal Medicine
Acton Medical
Acton, MA
The Monday Morning Problem
With a whopping 2,800 patients, plenty of folks calling Dr. Ed Knights' practice ended up on hold. In fact, Monday mornings regularly marked the beginning of a recurrent cycle.
"You could literally watch the issues move through the system. They'd jam up the phone system for the first hour or two on Monday. Then the appointments started to back up in the middle of the week, and so on."
Fewer Phone Calls
RelayHealth has delighted many of his patients. "Some are so excited about reaching me online. They'll say, 'I can do that? Oh my gosh!,' They're so happy."
Dr. Knights has been pleased as well. "We're saving a huge number of phone calls," he says, noting that RelayHealth has helped smooth out that glut of 8:01 a.m. phone calls on Monday morning.
Secure online communications have been particularly helpful for elderly patients, whose families work with the doctor on their behalf, and for Dr. Knights' mental health patients. "I think patients experiencing depression find it easier to sit down and type their symptoms than tell a nurse," he says.
webVisits Work
Dr. Knights regularly consults with some of those mental health patients using the RelayHealth webVisit®. After an initial consultation and a follow-up visit, he schedules the next visit as a webVisit. "They're happy to pay $20 to not have to drive in, and I can usually get all the information I need through the Depression webVisit," Dr. Knights says.
Initially, Dr. Knights was concerned he'd be deluged with webVisits. That didn't happen. "There's no way to know until you try it," he notes. "For a long time, I got none. Now I get one to two per day."
