ThinkMedFirst: 21,000 Monthly Calls Across Hybrid Primary/Urgent Care

ThinkMedFirst operates a healthcare model that most communication platforms weren't designed to handle: a hybrid practice combining primary care and urgent care under one organization. Patients visiting for wellness exams have fundamentally different communication needs than patients calling about acute symptoms. The phone system needs to route both, document both, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks — across a high volume of calls that reflects both the scheduled flow of primary care and the unpredictable surges of urgent care.

Based in Jacksonville, North Carolina, ThinkMedFirst processes 21,000 patient calls per month through CallMyDoc, managed by their existing staff without adding headcount. Here is how a hybrid care model with complex routing needs found a communication platform that actually matched their operational reality.

The Challenge: Hybrid Care Means Hybrid Communication Demands

Most medical communication platforms are designed for one model: either scheduled primary care or walk-in urgent care. ThinkMedFirst needed a system that handled both simultaneously, because their patients move fluidly between the two:

• Primary care calls follow predictable patterns: appointment scheduling, prescription refill requests, lab results, referral coordination, follow-up scheduling. These calls are important but rarely urgent, and many can be handled without immediate provider involvement.
• Urgent care calls are inherently unpredictable: acute symptoms, injury assessments, same-day appointment requests, clinical triage questions. These calls require faster routing and often need clinical judgment to determine whether the patient should come in, go to an ER, or manage at home.
• The crossover: A primary care patient calling about worsening symptoms may need urgent care routing. An urgent care patient calling for follow-up after a visit becomes a primary care workflow. The system needs to categorize and route based on the nature of the call, not the patient's original care track.

At 21,000 calls per month, the volume alone would strain most practice phone systems. Combined with the routing complexity of a hybrid model, ThinkMedFirst needed infrastructure that could categorize call types accurately, route to the correct department or provider, and scale without proportional staffing increases.

The Solution: 187 Dashboards for Granular Routing

ThinkMedFirst's CallMyDoc deployment uses 187 individual dashboards — each representing a distinct routing configuration. This granular setup allows the practice to manage communication at the department, provider, and function level rather than routing everything through a single intake point.

The 187-dashboard architecture means:

• Department-specific routing: Primary care calls, urgent care calls, prescription requests, scheduling, billing — each function has its own dashboard with its own routing rules and escalation protocols.
• Provider-level tracking: Individual providers can monitor their own call volumes, response times, and request types through their dedicated dashboards.
• Operational visibility: Practice leadership can view aggregate metrics across all 187 dashboards or drill down into specific departments to identify bottlenecks, staffing needs, or training opportunities.

This level of routing granularity is what separates clinical communication infrastructure from generic answering solutions. A traditional answering service receives calls and pages someone. CallMyDoc categorizes each call into one of 12 clinical request types and routes it according to ThinkMedFirst's specific protocols — different rules for different departments, different urgency levels, different times of day.

The Results: Scale Without Added Headcount

21,000 Monthly Calls — Same Staff

The defining metric of ThinkMedFirst's deployment is this: 21,000 patient calls per month handled by existing staff. No new hires for phone coverage. No outsourced call center. No answering service contract with per-call charges escalating monthly.

To understand what this means operationally, consider the math. At an average of 3 minutes per call (identification, request capture, routing, documentation), 21,000 monthly calls would require approximately 1,050 hours of staff time per month — the equivalent of 6-7 full-time employees dedicated exclusively to phone operations. With CallMyDoc handling the initial call processing, categorization, and routing, that staff-time requirement drops dramatically.

The staff that would have been consumed by phone operations is instead available for patient care, administrative functions, and the operational tasks that keep a hybrid practice running. This isn't a marginal efficiency improvement — it's a structural change in how staff time is allocated.

1.49 Million Total Calls Processed

Over the course of the deployment, CallMyDoc has processed 1.49 million total patient calls for ThinkMedFirst. This cumulative volume demonstrates the platform's reliability at sustained high volume — not a one-month spike, but consistent month-over-month performance across the full lifecycle of the deployment.

Across 1.49 million calls: zero lost calls. Every call answered. Every call documented. Every interaction available in the patient's record for continuity of care, compliance, and liability protection.

35.3% Daytime Resolution Within 2 Hours

More than a third of all daytime patient requests — 35.3% — are resolved within 2 hours of the initial call. For a hybrid practice where request types range from simple appointment confirmations to complex clinical triage, this resolution rate reflects the efficiency of CallMyDoc's categorization and routing system.

Routine requests (scheduling, refills, status inquiries) are resolved fastest because they follow predictable workflows. Clinical requests that require provider input take longer but still benefit from the structured delivery format: the provider receives a categorized call summary with patient chart context, not a vague message from an answering service. This context-rich delivery reduces the back-and-forth that typically delays resolution.

Hybrid Care Routing in Practice

The real test of ThinkMedFirst's CallMyDoc deployment is how it handles the unique routing challenges of a hybrid care model. Here's how the system manages scenarios that would overwhelm a traditional phone workflow:

Scenario: Acute Symptom Call During Business Hours

A patient calls at 2 PM reporting sudden, severe abdominal pain. The AI identifies the patient, transcribes their description, and categorizes the call as an urgent clinical concern. The call is immediately routed to the urgent care clinical team — not the scheduling desk, not a general front-desk staff member. The clinical team receives the call summary with the patient's medical history, current medications, and recent visit notes, enabling an informed triage decision within minutes.

Scenario: Post-Visit Follow-Up After Hours

A patient who was seen in urgent care earlier that day calls at 8 PM with questions about their discharge instructions. The AI identifies the patient, pulls up their same-day visit notes, and routes the call to the on-call provider with full context. The provider sees what was diagnosed, what was prescribed, and what instructions were given — enabling a quick, informed response without having to access the EHR separately.

Scenario: Primary Care Patient Needing Same-Day Urgent Care

A patient calling to discuss chronic disease management mentions new symptoms that suggest an acute concern. The AI categorizes the call based on the described symptoms, not the patient's usual care track. The call is flagged for clinical review rather than routing to the scheduling queue for a standard follow-up. This intelligent categorization prevents urgent concerns from being buried in routine scheduling workflows.

Documentation and Liability Protection

For a hybrid care practice, documentation is especially critical. Urgent care encounters carry higher clinical risk — patients presenting with acute symptoms, time-sensitive decisions, and higher probability of adverse outcomes. Every undocumented phone interaction represents a liability gap.

CallMyDoc's automatic documentation ensures that every patient call — whether it's a routine appointment confirmation or a clinical triage conversation — is transcribed, timestamped, categorized, and logged in the patient's EHR record. This creates a complete communication audit trail that includes:

• When the patient called
• What they reported (verbatim transcription)
• How the call was categorized
• Who received the routed call
• When the provider or staff responded
• What action was taken

This documentation chain is the same whether the call arrives at 10 AM or 10 PM, during a busy Monday or a quiet Sunday. The consistency of documentation — enforced by infrastructure rather than relying on staff compliance — is what provides reliable liability protection.

The Hybrid Care Model and the Future of Practice Communication

ThinkMedFirst's deployment is significant beyond its individual metrics because it demonstrates that AI-powered clinical communication works for non-traditional practice models. The healthcare industry is increasingly moving toward hybrid, multi-specialty, and multi-service models that combine different care types under one operational umbrella. These models create communication complexity that traditional phone systems and answering services were never designed to handle.

The ability to categorize calls by clinical type, route them to the correct department or provider based on sophisticated rules, and maintain consistent documentation regardless of call volume or complexity — that's the infrastructure that hybrid care models require. And ThinkMedFirst's results show that this infrastructure delivers at scale: 21,000 calls per month, 1.49 million total, managed by existing staff.

CallMyDoc provides clinical communication infrastructure to healthcare organizations across 38 states, from traditional single-specialty practices to complex multi-service operations. The platform processes approximately 390,000-400,000 patient calls per month with zero lost calls and zero data breaches across 26 million+ patient interactions.

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Schedule a live demo to see how CallMyDoc handles the communication complexity of your practice model — with no setup fees, no contracts, and a 30-day trial.