Castle Hills Family Practice: 50% Phone Workload Reduction in 90 Days

When Dr. Rodriguez opened Castle Hills Family Practice in San Antonio, Texas, the phones were manageable. Two front-desk staff handled incoming calls, scheduled appointments, and managed the daily rhythm of a growing family medicine clinic. But as the patient panel expanded to a second office, the phone system became the practice's biggest operational problem.

"We were drowning," is how the office manager described it. Morning call volume regularly exceeded what two front-desk staff could handle. Patients sat on hold. Voicemails piled up overnight. And the most alarming discovery: more than half of all patient calls were coming after hours — evenings, weekends, and holidays — when nothing but a voicemail greeting was available.

Castle Hills needed a solution that could handle their call volume without adding headcount, document every patient interaction for liability protection, and provide real after-hours coverage instead of a voicemail dead end. Here is what happened when they implemented CallMyDoc.

The Challenge: Two Offices, One Overwhelmed Phone System

Castle Hills Family Practice operates two locations in the San Antonio metro area. Before CallMyDoc, the practice faced a set of interconnected problems that are familiar to any growing primary care operation:

• Peak-hour phone gridlock: Between 8 and 10 AM, all phone lines were occupied. Patients calling during this window either waited on hold or gave up entirely. Some called back later, compounding the afternoon volume. Others simply didn't call back at all.
• After-hours documentation gap: The practice used a basic voicemail system after 5 PM. Messages left overnight had to be triaged each morning before the first patient arrived — often 30-60 messages requiring staff to listen, transcribe, and route before normal operations could begin.
• No chart context for callbacks: When staff returned calls, they had to pull up the patient's chart, review recent visits, and piece together the context of the voicemail — a process that added 2-3 minutes per callback on top of the actual conversation.
• Liability exposure: Voicemails left on weekends weren't addressed until Monday. A patient calling Friday evening with a post-procedure concern wouldn't receive a response for 60+ hours. Every unanswered after-hours call represented a potential documentation gap in the event of a malpractice claim.

The practice considered hiring a third front-desk employee and contracting with a traditional answering service. But adding staff only addressed daytime volume, and traditional answering services introduce their own problems: operators without chart access, garbled messages, and per-call charges that escalate unpredictably.

The Solution: CallMyDoc Clinical Communication Platform

Castle Hills implemented CallMyDoc across both office locations. The setup included custom voice prompts for each location, on-call schedule configuration for their provider rotation, and EHR integration that connected CallMyDoc directly to the practice's patient records.

The implementation took less than a week. No new hardware. No software installations on office computers. No disruption to existing workflows. Staff received training on the dashboard interface and the on-call providers were onboarded to the mobile response system.

What Changed Immediately

From day one, every patient call was answered — not by voicemail, not by a hold queue, but by CallMyDoc's AI. The system identified each patient by date of birth, matched them to their chart, transcribed their request, categorized it into one of 12 clinical request types, and routed it to the appropriate staff member or provider.

The morning voicemail triage ritual disappeared entirely. After-hours calls were already documented, categorized, and waiting in the dashboard when staff arrived. No listening to garbled voicemails. No manually transcribing messages. No guessing at urgency levels.

The Results: 90-Day Performance Data

After 90 days on the CallMyDoc platform, Castle Hills Family Practice measured the following outcomes:

50% Reduction in Phone Workload

The most immediate and measurable impact was on front-desk staff. CallMyDoc's AI handled routine calls — appointment confirmations, prescription refill requests, basic status inquiries — automatically. These calls, which previously consumed 2-4 minutes each of staff time, were now processed without any human intervention.

The result: a 50% reduction in phone-related workload for front-desk staff. That freed time went directly into patient-facing activities — faster check-ins, more thorough insurance verification, and the kind of personal attention that patients notice and appreciate.

5,222 Monthly Calls Processed

The platform processed 5,222 calls per month across both Castle Hills locations. For a two-office family practice, that volume would have required significant additional staffing to handle manually. Instead, the existing team managed the workload with time to spare.

Every one of those 5,222 monthly calls was answered on the first ring. No busy signals. No hold queues. No abandoned calls. The non-blocking architecture meant that even during peak morning hours, when dozens of patients called simultaneously, every call got through immediately.

51.9% After-Hours Call Volume

This was the statistic that changed how Castle Hills thought about patient communication: 51.9% of all patient calls arrived after hours. More than half of their patient communication was happening when nobody was in the office.

Before CallMyDoc, those calls hit voicemail. Patients with legitimate concerns — medication reactions, post-visit questions, symptom changes — had to wait until the next business day for a response. With CallMyDoc's after-hours coverage, every one of those calls was handled with the same process as a daytime call: patient identification, chart context, transcription, categorization, and routing to the on-call provider.

On-call providers received each after-hours call with a chart summary on their mobile device. They could see the patient's name, recent visits, current medications, allergies, and the AI's transcription of the concern — all before making a decision or returning the call. This context-rich delivery meant providers responded 70% faster than they had under the old voicemail system.

1,938 Unique Patients Served

In just 90 days, 1,938 unique patients interacted with the CallMyDoc system. That's 1,938 patients who experienced zero hold times, immediate call handling, and documented follow-through on their requests.

For a family practice where patient retention depends heavily on accessibility and responsiveness, this level of consistent service delivery across nearly 2,000 patients in a single quarter represents a fundamental shift in patient experience.

After-Hours Impact: Closing the Documentation Gap

The after-hours transformation deserves special attention because it addressed Castle Hills' most significant liability exposure.

Under the old system, a patient calling at 9 PM on a Friday with a concerning symptom had exactly one option: leave a voicemail. The voicemail sat untouched until Monday morning. If the patient's condition worsened over the weekend, there was no documentation that they had attempted to reach the practice, no record of what they reported, and no evidence that the practice had a system in place to respond.

With CallMyDoc, that same 9 PM Friday call is now:

1. Answered immediately — no voicemail, no hold time
2. Patient-identified — matched to their chart by date of birth
3. Transcribed — AI creates a verbatim record of what the patient reported
4. Categorized — classified by urgency and clinical type
5. Routed — sent to the on-call provider with chart context
6. Documented — the provider's response, response time, and instructions are all logged in the EHR

This complete chain of documentation — from initial call to provider response — creates the kind of audit trail that protects practices in malpractice reviews. Every step is timestamped. Nothing is left to memory or manual notation. The documentation exists regardless of whether it's 2 PM on a Tuesday or 3 AM on a Sunday.

Staff and Provider Experience

The impact on Castle Hills' team extended beyond workload reduction. Front-desk staff reported less stress during peak hours because they were no longer the sole bottleneck for every incoming call. They could focus on the patients standing in front of them without the constant interruption of ringing phones.

Providers, particularly those on after-hours call, reported a significantly better experience. Instead of receiving a cryptic answering service message — "Patient called, says they have pain" — they received structured call summaries with full chart context. They knew who was calling, what had been done recently, what medications the patient was on, and what the AI had categorized as the likely concern. This turned after-hours calls from an exercise in detective work into informed clinical decision-making.

Why This Case Study Matters for Similar Practices

Castle Hills Family Practice represents a common profile in American healthcare: a small-to-mid-size family medicine practice with 2 offices, a growing patient panel, and a phone system that hasn't kept pace with demand. The challenges they faced — peak-hour overload, after-hours gaps, documentation liability — are not unique to Castle Hills. They're structural problems that affect the majority of primary care practices in the United States.

What makes the Castle Hills results instructive is the specificity of the data:

• 50% phone workload reduction — quantified, not estimated
• 5,222 monthly calls — actual volume handled by the platform
• 51.9% after-hours calls — proving that more than half of patient communication happens outside office hours
• 1,938 unique patients in 90 days — demonstrating the scale of patient interaction managed

These aren't projections. They're measured outcomes from a real practice operating under real clinical conditions.

From Voicemail to Clinical Communication Infrastructure

The transformation at Castle Hills Family Practice illustrates a broader principle: the phone system is not a utility — it's clinical infrastructure. When patient calls are answered, identified, transcribed, categorized, routed, and documented automatically, the practice operates at a fundamentally different level of efficiency, safety, and patient satisfaction.

Castle Hills didn't add staff to solve their phone problem. They didn't contract with a traditional answering service that would have introduced new errors and documentation gaps. They replaced their legacy phone workflow with purpose-built clinical communication infrastructure — and the results speak for themselves.

CallMyDoc provides the same clinical communication platform to practices across 38 states, from single-office clinics to 200+ location physician groups. The platform processes approximately 390,000-400,000 patient calls per month with zero lost calls and zero data breaches across its entire history of 26 million+ patient interactions.

Related Case Studies

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Schedule a live demo to see how CallMyDoc can deliver the same results for your practice — with no setup fees, no contracts, and a 30-day trial.