After-Hours Coverage

FONEMED provides after-hours coverage to Physician Practices, Clinics and Hospital Systems throughout North America. We customize our triage services to ensure your patients receive the quality of care and services they expect from your office.  Whether you are a pediatrician, cosmetic dermatologist, obstetrician, family practitioner or other physician, we will take calls from your patients and handle them according to your instructions. 

At the end of the day, on weekends, or anytime you need to be away from the office, simply have your answering service direct all medically-oriented calls to our call center.  Our Registered Nurses will triage your patients and direct them to the most appropriate care, be it the Emergency Room or an appointment at your offices. 

We will then fax an Encounter Report directly to your offices, so that you will know what advice was given to your patients.

Program Specifics

The Service

FONEMED has listened to the needs of physician practices, and developed a streamlined triage call that will assess your patients’ after-hours medical needs, direct them to the appropriate care and fully document the encounter.  This ensures that you remain the primary source of care and health information for your patients, without having to take calls after hours yourself. 

Call Options

There are three Call Processing options:

1) Using FONEMED’s Integrated Answering Service 

FONEMED has created Med-Dial™, a fully outsourced solution to handle physicians’ after-hour calls. Calls coming in to a physician’s office are seamlessly routed to the our partner's call center. Whether the caller needs information, wants to make an appointment or requires medical assistance, our professionals handle every call according to the physician’s specifications. 

The answering service works closely with each physician to develop mutually agreed upon guidelines for transferring calls to nurse triage. The integration of the two services better manages calls, insuring that they are handled at the appropriate level of expertise, thus avoiding unnecessary calls to the triage nurse. When calls requiring medical assistance are transferred to our Registered Nurses, the nurse will triage the patient, acting as an extension of the physician practice - not a replacement. At the end of the triage call an encounter report is faxed to the physician’s office, so that he/she knows exactly what advice was given to his/her patient. The physician will always be able to speak directly with our nurses as well.

2) Using Your Existing Answering Service

When you are out of the office, forward your calls to your answering service just as you would normally do.  Your answering service will then handle any of your routine information calls, and direct calls requiring medical assistance to FONEMED’s nurses based on your specifications.  The answering service can forward these calls to FONEMED either by filling out an Internet-based form with the caller’s demographic information and reason for calling, or by faxing the same information to our call center.  Our nurses will then prioritize your calls and call the patients back, within an average of 30 minutes.  The nurse will identify himself or herself as a Registered Nurse associated with your office, and will triage the patient using computerized protocols.  At the end of the call a report will be faxed to your office, with details about the call and the disposition recommended by the nurse.

3) Transferring calls directly to FONEMED

If you would prefer not to use an answering service, you may directly transfer all of your after-hours calls to our Registered Nurses.  The nurses will provide health information and/or triage to callers with medical questions, and will refer all other questions back to your office during normal business hours.  At the end of every medically- oriented call we will fax an encounter report to your office. 

Please Note: FONEMED does not place callers on hold.  We take calls live when possible, but operate via call-back for other calls.  This means that if all of our nurses are speaking with callers, your patients will not be waiting on hold. Instead, we will have a live operator take the caller’s pertinent information, and the next available nurse will call the patient back.  This system also allows us to prioritize calls, so that potentially medically emergent calls will be returned before others.

Protocols

FONEMED uses the computerized pediatric protocols of Dr. Barton Schmitt, and the adult protocols of Dr. David Thompson.  These protocols have become standards of care for telephone triage in the United States and internationally and are well known and respected by medical practitioners.  Each protocol is put through an exhaustive testing and review process, involving repeated draft iterations and detailed written reviews by members of a Committee that includes call center medical directors, telephone triage nurses, emergency physicians, primary care physicians, physician sub-specialists, and behavioral health experts.  The standing Review Committee for pediatric protocols includes 11 members, and for adult protocols includes 26.  Each triage guideline is referenced to current literature.  Decision-making is evidence-based whenever possible, and all guidelines are updated yearly.

Implementation Process

Upon contract signature, FONEMED will forward to you an implementation questionnaire.  This questionnaire will address the specifics of your practice and the service that we will be providing to you and your patients.  We will also arrange a conference call between you and the Client Services Director of our call center, to assist you in filling out the questionnaire and to make sure that all details have been sorted out. 

As soon as we have the questionnaire back and know all of your expectations, we will be able to provide you with a program start date.

Triage Checklist

When comparing triage services, there are a number of questions to ask each vendor.  Click here to see FONEMED's recommended questions. 

Pricing

FONEMED's after-hours services are priced on a per-call basis, with a low monthly minimum.

For more information on FONEMED's after hours services for medical practices, including a specific price quote, call us at 1-800-FONEMED (1-800-366-3633), e-mail us at health@fonemed.com, or click here to fill out our online form.