Altera TouchWorks—formerly Allscripts TouchWorks before the Allscripts/Veradigm corporate restructuring—is one of the most comprehensive enterprise ambulatory EHR platforms in American healthcare. Used by thousands of providers in large physician groups, multi-specialty organizations, and health systems nationwide, TouchWorks is built for complex clinical workflows: customizable documentation templates, interoperability across care settings, and deep practice management capabilities that smaller EHR systems can't match.
But TouchWorks wasn't designed to manage your phones. And in most TouchWorks practices, the phone system is the weakest link in the entire clinical operation—a gap where patient communications get lost between the caller and the EHR, staff burn out from relentless call volume, and documentation standards that TouchWorks enforces inside the chart don't extend to the interactions happening over the phone.
This guide explains how AI-powered clinical communication infrastructure integrates with Altera TouchWorks to close that gap—turning every patient call into a structured, documented, routable clinical task that flows into your EHR automatically.
TouchWorks practices tend to be larger, higher-volume operations—multi-provider groups, multi-site health systems, enterprise organizations with complex departmental structures. The phone volume scales accordingly. Here's what the daily workflow looks like:
Every step is manual, interruptible, and error-prone. In enterprise-scale TouchWorks environments with multiple departments, locations, and on-call rotations, the complexity compounds. Tasks get mis-routed across departments. After-hours calls fall into voicemail. Messages get abbreviated or paraphrased, losing the patient's actual words and the clinical nuance that matters for triage.
The result: 30–50% of front-desk staff time consumed by phone-related tasks, providers interrupted by callback requests throughout the day, and a growing volume of undocumented patient communications that create both quality concerns and liability exposure.
CallMyDoc integrates with TouchWorks to automate the entire journey from patient call to documented clinical task. The integration is designed for the enterprise-scale complexity that TouchWorks practices operate in—multi-department routing, multi-site coverage, and high call volumes that would overwhelm manual workflows.
Here's what the integration does:
When a patient calls, CallMyDoc's AI identifies them by date of birth and matches them to their TouchWorks record. No manual chart lookup. No asking the patient to spell their name while three other lines ring. The system knows who's calling and pulls their clinical context before a staff member ever gets involved.
In large TouchWorks practices handling 200–500+ calls per day across multiple departments, this eliminates one of the most time-consuming steps in every phone interaction: patient identification and chart navigation. That's hours of cumulative staff time saved daily on identification alone.
Every call is transcribed, categorized into one of 12 clinical request types, and documented in TouchWorks as a structured clinical task. The categories include:
Each task appears in the correct provider's or department's TouchWorks task queue with the patient's actual words, AI-generated categorization, urgency assessment, and millisecond timestamps. No sticky notes. No callback logs. No manual transcription from one system to another.
Providers don't need to learn a new system. Tasks from patient calls appear in their TouchWorks workflow alongside other clinical items. They review, respond, and close—and the entire interaction chain is documented in the patient's chart as a single, timestamped thread.
For prescription refills, providers can approve directly from their mobile device in under 30 seconds—no need to log into TouchWorks on a desktop, navigate through multiple screens, and process the refill manually. The approval is documented in the patient's record automatically.
TouchWorks doesn't provide native after-hours call handling. When the office closes, patient calls typically go to voicemail or a traditional answering service—neither of which feeds back into TouchWorks. For enterprise organizations with complex on-call rotations spanning multiple departments and locations, the after-hours gap is even more pronounced.
CallMyDoc's after-hours platform handles this seamlessly:
The integration replaces multiple manual phone-to-EHR workflows with automated processes:
Before: Patient calls → staff takes message → staff enters refill request in TouchWorks → provider navigates to patient chart → provider approves → staff calls patient back. Time: 15–30 minutes per refill across multiple staff members and systems.
After: Patient calls → CallMyDoc transcribes and categorizes as refill request → task created in TouchWorks → provider approves on mobile in 30 seconds → patient notified. Time: under 2 minutes, zero staff involvement.
Before: Patient calls → staff searches for availability across providers and locations → back-and-forth on dates and times → staff books in TouchWorks → confirmation call or manual reminder entry. Time: 5–10 minutes per scheduling call.
After: Patient calls → CallMyDoc offers self-scheduling in under 40 seconds → appointment booked → automated dual reminders sent at 7 days and 1 day before the visit, reducing no-shows by up to 40%. Time: 40 seconds, zero staff involvement.
Before: Patient calls with symptoms → staff takes abbreviated notes → staff creates task in TouchWorks → task may be mis-routed in a multi-department environment → provider reviews hours later, possibly with incomplete clinical information.
After: Patient calls → CallMyDoc captures exact words and clinical details → AI categorizes urgency → task routed to the correct provider or department → urgent cases escalated immediately with full context.
Before: Patient calls after hours → voicemail or answering service → message delivered next morning (or lost) → no TouchWorks documentation → no audit trail.
After: Patient calls → CallMyDoc processes and categorizes → urgent calls escalated to on-call provider immediately with chart context → provider responds from mobile → entire interaction documented in TouchWorks with millisecond timestamps.
CallMyDoc has been validated across practices of every size—from small offices to enterprise health systems with complexity levels that match TouchWorks deployments. Here are measured outcomes from production environments:
Across all deployments, CallMyDoc has processed 26 million+ patient calls with zero lost calls and zero breaches in 38 states—a track record that matters for enterprise TouchWorks organizations where reliability and compliance are non-negotiable.
TouchWorks practices—especially larger enterprise organizations—typically cobble together multiple systems to handle patient calls:
| Current Approach | Problems | CallMyDoc + TouchWorks |
|---|---|---|
| Staff answering phones manually | 30–50% of time consumed, constant interruptions, burnout, high turnover | AI handles calls; staff focus on in-person patients and complex tasks |
| Voicemail for overflow and after-hours | No documentation trail, messages lost, no urgency triage, no timestamps | Every call transcribed, categorized, and documented in TouchWorks |
| Traditional answering service | No EHR integration, message delays, transcription errors, per-call costs | Direct TouchWorks integration, real-time processing, flat-rate pricing |
| Patient portal messaging | Low adoption (30–40%), excludes patients who prefer calling | Meets patients on their preferred channel—the phone |
| Manual callback logs and spreadsheets | Lost notes, no audit trail, inconsistent documentation across departments | Automatic timestamped documentation in TouchWorks with full audit trails |
Enterprise TouchWorks practices have legitimate concerns about implementation complexity—especially when integrating a new system across multiple departments and locations. CallMyDoc deployment is designed for that complexity:
Flat-rate pricing means there are no per-call or per-minute charges. Your practice can handle surges in call volume—flu season, appointment reminders, recall campaigns—without worrying about escalating costs.
Enterprise TouchWorks organizations handle Protected Health Information on every call, often across dozens of locations and hundreds of providers. Security isn't optional—it's a prerequisite. CallMyDoc meets that standard:
The platform provides complete audit trails for every patient interaction, including on-call schedules, provider contacts, response timestamps, and the full call transcript. This supports both HIPAA compliance and malpractice defense—ensuring that every communication is documented, not just the ones that happen inside the office.
Large TouchWorks practices and health systems often serve linguistically diverse communities across multiple regions. CallMyDoc provides real-time translation across 43 languages, transcribing patient calls in their native language and translating to English for provider review. Responses are documented bilingually in the EHR, supporting Section 1557 language access compliance without requiring multilingual staff on every shift or at every location.
TouchWorks is an enterprise-grade EHR built for the complexity of large physician groups and health systems. It manages clinical documentation, practice workflows, billing, and interoperability at scale. But it wasn't designed to manage the hundreds of daily patient phone calls that consume staff time, interrupt providers, and create documentation gaps in the clinical record.
CallMyDoc bridges that gap with an integration that transforms patient calls into structured clinical tasks—documented, categorized, and routed directly into TouchWorks without manual re-entry. No answering service delays. No voicemail black holes. No sticky notes that fall off the monitor.
With 26 million+ patient calls processed, zero breaches, and zero lost calls across 38 states—including enterprise deployments with 200+ locations and 900+ providers—the platform has been validated at the scale that TouchWorks practices actually operate in.
Founded in 2013 by Dr. Shahinaz Soliman (board-certified family physician, 30+ years clinical experience) and Carl Silva (Chief Scientist, 20+ years systems architecture), CallMyDoc was built from real clinical experience with the communication gaps that EHR systems—even enterprise ones like TouchWorks—were never designed to solve.
Schedule a 30-minute demo to see how CallMyDoc integrates with your Altera TouchWorks environment. We'll show you real-time patient identification, clinical task creation, multi-department routing, after-hours handling, and provider response workflows—all documented directly in TouchWorks. No setup fees, no long-term contracts, 30-day free trial.