Success In Practice: Call Doctor Case Study

Since its founding in 1985, Call Doctor Medical Group www.1800calldoc.com has responded to over 300,000 housecalls for a wide range of patients in the San Diego area. Today, Call Doctor is a leading provider of comprehensive advanced medical care delivered in the home. Conducting around 900 visits each month, Call Doctor is one of the only housecall practices in the U.S. offering the services of board-certified physicians, telephone triage, mobile laboratory and x-ray support.

Call Doctor founder and housecall pioneer, Dr. C. Gresham Bayne, MD continues to be one of the most passionate and vocal advocates for bringing health care back to the patient’s home. The vast majority of Call Doctor’s patients are elderly, homebound individuals often too frail or ill to visit hospitals and doctors’ offices. Since 1985, Call Doctor has successfully been bringing a higher level of patient care, directly to the patient — restoring dignity to the patient-doctor relationship while saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in health care costs.  Powering the success of this thriving housecall practice is the JanusOS^SM.

In August of 2006, Call Doctor implemented JanusOS^SM to eliminate their costly office server and cut back on expensive internet bandwidth. After outfitting each of their 10 physicians, physicians assistants, and x-ray technologists with a fully-configured JanusOS^SM tablet PC, the downpour of paperwork at Call Doctor ceased within a few days. This fast implementation was a result of Janus Health’s knowledge and understanding of the technology issues facing wireless mobile practitioners, backed by the robust network infrastructure supporting the JanusOS^SM. Numerous costs were drastically reduced from courier expenses to printer cartridges, and Call Doctor is even finding that training time for clinicians new to housecalls is also reduced by JanusOS^SM. Now Dr. Bayne is no longer concerned with common problems like local power outages, backup failures, or ISP issues that used to put Call Doctor’s practice data and clinician productivity at risk.

JanusOS^SM has enabled Call Doctor’s housecall physicians to provide almost the same level and breadth of care as a hospital or ER, right in the patient’s home. Dialing a toll-free number, patients and their families reach Call Doctor’s central patient care coordinator for coordinating ancillary care or to schedule an appointment.  Equipped with JanusOS^SM’s real-time scheduling system, the patient care coordinator triages incoming telephone calls, collects vital patient information, and is able to schedule a visit directly into the physician’s Outlook® calendar. While in the field, Call Doctor physicians are alerted to scheduled appointments, and may utilize a variety of options for referencing maps, driving directions, or GPS guidance to find the patient’s home.

Once at the patient’s home, the Call Doctor physician uses JanusOS^SM to record and update patient information onto a mobile laptop or tablet computer, without ever leaving the patient’s bedside. JanusOS^SM provides the physician with centralized remote access to the patient’s complete medical records and history, and functions both offline and online so patients are treated without depending on internet connectivity. The topography of San Diego County varies greatly as a result of Southern California’s coastal valleys and mountain desert, so Call Doctor found JanusOS^SM to be the ideal solution for sporadic, unpredictable WWAN connectivity.

JanusOS^SM can be customized for an array of mobile diagnostic devices in the physician’s arsenal — including portable EKG, ultrasound and x-ray machines, and point-of-care laboratory analyzers. By utilizing familiar applications such as Microsoft Outlook® and Adobe Reader®, JanusOS^SM allowed Call Doctor to design their user interface around specific devices utilized by their practice. This allows Call Doctor physicians to treat and diagnose most medical problems quickly and effectively in the patient’s home instead of an ER.

Equipped with JanusOS^SM, Call Doctor physicians are also able to sign paperwork, order medical tests, services, consults and lab results, communicate with colleagues, send and receive electronic faxes and voicemail, and even admit patients to the hospital — all at the patient’s bedside. The end result: Call Doctor provides comprehensive, expert in-home diagnosis and treatment at a fraction of the usual cost.

In fact, Call Doctor housecalls average around 70% less than the basic charge of an emergency room visit in San Diego — not including the typical $350 ambulance charge. While helping control health care costs and elevate patient care, Call Doctor has flourished as a successful enterprise for Dr. Bayne and his colleagues. Today, this practice continues to grow and remain profitable.