Recall Point Person Protocol
Recall is VITAL to the success of the practice, as it ensures our schedules will be filled the following year, and it ensures patients are getting regular care for their eyes. This role is one of the most important responsibilities in the office-so congrats on being entrusted with this super special role! In this role, you will have a few tasks that MUST be completed each week. It’s really important that if you fall behind, you catch up quickly, as these tasks are time sensitive! Be sure to let your manager know if you are running into challenges completing the tasks weekly.
As the Recall Point Person, there are 3 big tasks that you will need complete each week:
Organizing previous week’s postcards
Print schedules and prepare postcards.
Mail the postcards, and track in Recall Spreadsheet.
Before we dive into HOW to do each task, let’s talk about the current recall policy and the work that happens before you get involved: every patient that comes in for an exam receives a recall postcard that they self-address during their exam. The eyewear stylist then schedules their annual exam for the next year when they check the patient out, but they do NOT write the date and time on the postcard. The reason for this is that we often need to change patient appointments due to doc schedule changes, so it ends up being A LOT of extra work and confusion. Instead, they leave the date and time section blank on the postcard, and just schedule the appt in Eyecare.
All of those self-addressed postcards are bundled up each day with a rubber band, and a post it with the date is put on the bundle (each office does this). Once a week, all of the recall post cards from each office should be delivered to the WV office and put into the Recall Bin, and all of WV’s bundles should also be placed in this bin. Occasionally, patients are NOT scheduled for recall, or the postcard might not have been prepared for the patient, so it is possible to not have 100% of all patients that were seen the previous week in the bin. But fear not! The patients who are missed or that may not have a postcard will still be contacted through the weekly process that you will complete, so 100% of patients WILL be contacted for recall each year.
step one: organize the previous week’s postcards
This step is a super easy one, and should only take you 15 minutes, tops! Remember how we talked about all of the previous week’s postcards will be rubber banded and placed in the Recall bin? For this task, you are simply taking all of those postcards, and simply putting them in the correct “week” in the monthly recall bins. These clear bins are in the PR phones room cabinet, and you will simply pull out the bin that has the correct corresponding month on it. If you are unsure which month to choose, look at the post it note on the postcard bundles, and choose the month that is listed there.
Next, you are going to place the postcard bundles in the corresponding “week” in the bin. Each bin has 4 cards labeled “Week One,” “Week Two,” etc. Use your best judgement to decide which week the date on the postcard bundle should go into. For example, if the date is June 2nd, that will go in the “Week One” section. If the date is June 13th, it would most likely go into the “Week Two” section, etc. Leave the post it notes with the dates on the postcard bundles, as you will use these dates when the postcards are ready to be mailed. You will do nothing more with the bundles you sorted until next year! And that’s it! Super easy!
step two: print schedules and prepare postcards.
Things get a little trickier with this step, so make sure you let your manager know if you run into any hiccups while digesting this training. :) For this step, you will be working on schedules/postcards from LAST YEAR: let me explain! When patients come in for their eye exam, the eyewear stylist schedules their exam for NEXT YEAR and fills out a postcard. That postcard will be sorted into monthly recall bins, and left alone in the recall cabinet until next year, when the recall point person (you) will prepare and mail the postcard out 6 weeks before that exam appointment. Make sense? If not, keep reading-and definitely watch the training video!
First thing you need to do is figure out which week you are working on. It will be pretty easy once you get in the groove of it, because you will just pick up each week with the date where you left off. But if you are just starting out, here is how you find the dates of the week you are working in:
Take today’s date (for example 5/17).
Add 6 weeks to that date (6 weeks from 5/17 is 6/28).
Grab the bin that corresponds with that month from the Recall Cabinet, and find the week that corresponds with that date (6/28 would be in week four in the June monthly bin).
Next, grab ALL of the postcards in that Week’s section. It should be a bunch of bundles of postcards wrapped in a rubber band with a dated post it on each one. Find the bundle that has the earliest date on the post it, and the bundle with the latest date on the post it—-these are the dates you will be working on this week for recall postcards! Write down this date range for easy reference (for example 6/28-7/4)!
Now you are ready to print schedules! Go to the schedules in Eyecare, and go to the earliest date in your postcard bundle range (in my example, it would be 6/28), but don’t forget to go to that date from LAST YEAR. So if the postcard says 6/28 and its the year 2021, I will pull up 6/28/2020 because THAT’s when the postcard was created. Pull up the WV Office at a Glance, and then go to “Print” and then “Office at a Glance.” This will print all of the doctor’s schedules on that day at that office.
Change the office location (but not the date yet) and repeat printing “Office at a Glance” for each office location (JT, TSC, and LC). You will then have all of the offices schedules from last year with all of the patient’s who were seen listed.
Repeat steps 3 and 4 with every day in your week’s date range (in the example it was 6/28-7/4).
Now that you have all of the schedules printed, grab the bundles of postcards, and go through each postcard one by one, finding the patient who is named on the postcard on the printed schedules. Quick tip: each office has a slightly different postcard, so you can save yourself some time by only checking the schedules for the office of the postcard bundle you are working on. Another quick tip: you will only have postcards for patients who came in for an exam on the printed schedules, so no need to check intermediates, threshold schedules, INR schedules, etc. Just the doc schedules and just exam patients.
When you match a patient’s name from a postcard to the printed schedule, HIGHLIGHT that patient’s name on the printed schedule.
Then, pull up that patient’s name in Eyecare. Check the “Appointment History” section on their demographic, and find their upcoming scheduled exam. Make sure it is still “B” for booked and not cancelled. ON THE POSTCARD, FILL IN THE DATE, TIME, and DOC SECTIONS with this appointment information. Then, set the postcard aside and move on to the next postcard. Place postcards in a separate pile by location.
IF THE PATIENT HAS NO ANNUAL OR EP EXAM SCHEDULED, simply check the box on the postcard that asks the patient to contact us to schedule their exam, and then move on to the next postcard. Place in a separate pile from the postcards that were scheduled, by location. So basically at this point you should have 8 piles of postcards-4 different locations of the scheduled exam postcards, 4 different location piles of the not scheduled/box checked postcards. Make sense?
Repeat step 6 until you have gone through all of the bundles of postcards from that week’s section in the monthly bin. By this point, most of the names on your printed schedules should be highlighted! But we aren’t quite done with this step.
The last part of this step is to fill out a postcard for the exam patients who are NOT highlighted on the printed schedules (remember-this is for exam patients only, so you will have lots of patients who are not highlighted who came in for cl check or thresholds, etc. This last step is to make a postcard for exam patients who aren’t highlighted ONLY).
Grab a blank recall postcard for the location the patient was seen at on the report.
Pull up that patient in Eyecare, and address the postcard to this patient.
Next, check-does this patient have an exam scheduled? If so, add the date, time, and doc info to the postcard, and put in the corresponding pile of the previous postcards you created (schedule exam postcards by location). If the patient does NOT have an exam scheduled, check the box that asks the patient to call us back, and put in the corresponding pile of the previous postcards you completed.
That’s all for this step, and yep-it was a doozy! This one will take you a few hours to complete each week. But there is still just one last step.
step three: mail the postcards, and track in spreadsheet.
This last step goes back to being easy. Remember the 8 piles you have of postcards from the previous step? Well, in this step, you will simply count each pile and track it in the Recall Spreadsheet. This spreadsheet can be found by going to the PR Tracking Spreadsheets folder, then the Recall folder, and then find the spreadsheet with the correct year. Once you open it, you will see there is a separate tab for each office location, and four columns on each tab. Here’s what you will do:
For each location, record the number of postcards that were in the scheduled exam pile in the column labeled “Number of Preappointed Postcards Mailed” (these were the ones that you filled out a date, time and doc on the postcard).
For each location, record the number of postcards that were in the checked box pile in the column labeled “Number of Call to Schedule Postcards Mailed” (these are the ones where the patient had no appointment scheduled and you had to just check the box).
Save the spreadsheet, and close it.
LAST THING TO DO THIS WEEK WITH RECALL: PUT POSTAGE ON THE POSTCARDS! You can combine all of the piles and go to the postage machine-where you want to make sure you select postcard for the rate. Then run each postcard through the machine, take up to the front desk to go out in tomorrow’s mail, and YOU ARE DONE!!!
Seems like SOOOO much work, but once you do it a few times, it will be easy peasy lemon squeezy. For real! And it should only take you one day each week to complete for one week of recall-if that makes sense! If you have any questions, let your manager know! And happy recalling!