The Family Medicine Clinic is on the 2nd floor of the hospital and easily accessible for patients and providers. The clinic is broken down into two sides, if you’re in the lobby, the left side of the clinic is where Danielle and Dr. Gallo see patients. They found it easier to keep all the Women’s Health patients on the same side, so they get comfortable with both providers. The right side is where Dr. Pepper and Dr. Werkin (General Surgery & Wound Care) see their patients.
The clinic has 12 Exam rooms with a procedure room and a room dedicated to infusion therapy up here. Each provider will have 3-4 exam rooms to rotate through with the help of the MAs and nurses who check-in all the patients and help with the vitals. Each side has its own nurse’s station, so they really function as two separate, but connected departments.
Everybody from the support staff knows how to do everything. It doesn't matter what the specialty is. The Pre-cert coordinator knows how to work the front office, my front office is also certified to work the back. So, there's continuity if we must rotate people which is nice. The clinical staff can do any practice up here they're not dedicated to one provider. If they see somebody is waiting and somebody needs something they just do, which is nice.
When I asked Stephanie about her team she said “They're good. The girls that work at the front. I've been doing it a long time. Rebecca is not here today but she used to work downstairs in admissions, and she came up here, right around the same time I started and then Monica started with us about six months ago. But she's been doing front office stuff for about 20 years. They know how to schedule patients they understand the challenges and flow, they also understand what works and what doesn’t.”
The other good thing is the front and the back communicate a lot. They do a huddle every single morning and game plan for the day. They communicate about everything to make it efficient, especially regarding walk-ins, and patient flow. The clinic does see walk in appointments when necessary. If somebody calls and wants to get in for a new patient, very rarely are they so booked that someone can't see them within 24 hours.
Patient communication is mostly done by the front office staff including referrals and follow-ups. When follow-up results need to be communicated to the patient, and the results are normal, the staff will do most of those. If the results dictate a conversation with a provider, they will usually schedule a follow-up visit to have that conversation in person.
Stephanie continued; “Tammy does the majority of the outgoing referrals although Liam the whole back office knows how to do it, but Tammy owns that part of things. Anything that's referred out to specialty she, handles that. Amanda works in the back. She is my internal coordinator so she's going to prepare anything for any practice whether it's surgery, whether they need imaging in the hospital, whether it's an infusion, whether it's something that the patient needs on the wound, whatever it is that needs to be done with your medical practice, she's going to make sure that gets presorted and talk to the patient. about it and make sure it gets scheduled. And then the providers will send a message to the front to schedule a follow up visit with this patient and we'll get them on schedule.”