Thamesdoc use mobile phone recording for ‘doctors on the go’

Thamesdoc provides an essential Out-of-Hours doctors service which operates between 6.30pm until 8.00am the next morning and during weekends. Covering the county of Surrey, Thamesdoc provides this service to over 1.2 million patients ensuring that patients have access to medical facilities when local GP’s are unavailable.

The organisation has a dedicated 40 seat call centre which receives inbound calls from patients who have been given the number by their local surgeries. Every patient call is recorded regardless of whether they are speaking to a clinician, nurse, call centre agent or receptionist.

Incoming calls initially go to the call centre and are answered by non-clinical staff whose purpose is to quickly ascertain what is wrong with the patient and who is the most appropriate person to deal with their call
The details of the call are electronically transferred to a designated clinician, usually within the local vicinity of the patient and at this point the patient will be called back, often by a doctor using a mobile phone.
Historically, Thamesdoc has used a traditional call recording system to provide coverage for calls to and from the call centre but with the increased use of mobile phones it was apparent that more and more calls were taking place between patients and doctors without the protection of call recording. Thamesdoc realised that their mobile staff needed the same protection as their landline using colleagues and looked for a technical solution
OPEX Hosting worked with Thamesdoc to provide a safe and secure hosted telephony solution which would enable them to record every telephone call regardless of who was making it, regardless of whether it was inbound or outbound and regardless of whether it was made from a landline or mobile phone.

The solution also needed to ensure that all calls could be retrieved quickly and easily from a secure portal. The answer was OPEX’s in-network call recording service for both landlines and mobiles, delivered over a secure network and stored in the NHS N3 network.

According to Stephen Price, Chief Executive of Thamesdoc: “It was the mobile phones and our ability to record them that really sold the service to us. The OPEX solution was much more complete in comparison to other solutions that we reviewed. Although there is no charge to the patient it also works to our advantage commercially by giving us the potential of earning additional income by supplying our services to other organisations.”

Thamesdoc make over ¼ million patient calls per year and of those, only a very small percentage results in a patient complaint. However the company takes its governance and medico-legal responsibilities seriously, using call recordings to verify conversation content and assure that its high standards are consistently upheld.

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