How a multi-location DSO discovered what happens to new patient calls after someone picks up

Signature’s front office teams were doing what good teams do: focusing on the patients standing in front of them. But that commitment to in-office care was creating an unexpected blind spot. A new patient would call, ask to schedule, get placed on hold while the team helped someone in the office, and sometimes no one ever made it back to them.

Signature measured call answer rate at every location, and those calls still counted as answered. The scorecard captured whether someone picked up the phone. It couldn’t show that a new patient had waited five, nine, or even twenty-nine minutes before giving up.

Bennion kept hearing the pattern as she listened to calls one at a time. But she had no way to know whether she was hearing isolated incidents or a much larger problem across the organization.

Betsy sits on top of the recorded calls at every Signature location already running Fiona, and answers questions about them in plain language. Bennion did not build a report or file a request with an analyst. She asked Betsy directly how many calls were being placed on hold and lost, whether the patient had identified themselves as a new patient before the hold began, and how often that combination was happening across the group.

Betsy searched five months of calls and returned the set: new patient calls that had been placed on hold and lost, pulled out of thousands of recordings in a single pass. Bennion had gone from a pattern she recognized by ear to a population she could point at, using a question written in the same words she would have used to ask a colleague.

From there the finding became a business case. Working from the calls Betsy surfaced and the group’s own new patient economics, Bennion built an estimate of what holds were costing Signature in new patient revenue each year, and brought it to the senior leadership meeting that week.