On the way in
Hold times climb at exactly the hours patients are able to call. People abandon, call back later, or stop trying. An abandoned call leaves no record of what the patient needed, so nobody can work it afterwards.
Workflow / Patient access
Every caller should reach a usable next step.
Routine access work runs on the tested path. Ambiguous, sensitive and clinical needs go to a human owner with context. Containment is not the goal here, and it is not the measure.
Every request needs the right exit.
Routine access, sensitive exceptions, and clinical needs should not share one containment metric.
- 01Request arrives
- 02Routine request resolved
- 03Sensitive exception detected
- 04Clinical signal routed
- 05Human owner accepts
- 06Usable next step recorded
The access agent does not interpret symptoms or determine care.
Every request needs the right exit. Routine access, sensitive exceptions, and clinical needs should not share one containment metric. The diagram shows Request arrives, Routine request resolved, Sensitive exception detected, Clinical signal routed, Human owner accepts, Usable next step recorded. The access agent does not interpret symptoms or determine care.
The break
Access fails in three separate places
At the desk
Front-desk and scheduling staff handle a clinical question, a coverage problem and a language need inside the same five minutes. The queue does not pause, so the hardest call gets the least time.
On the way out
Outbound work is the first thing dropped: unfilled slots, missed appointments, confirmations. It is real access and real revenue, and it is always the thing that waits until tomorrow.
Operating contract
An access line is where clinical questions arrive unannounced
Patients do not label their calls. Somebody calling to reschedule will describe a symptom in the second sentence. So on this line the boundary is enforced by the stop list rather than by the caller: the agent stops on clinical and safety-sensitive language and hands the call to your designated licensed owner with context.
Triage, symptom interpretation, medical advice and urgent clinical response are your licensed team's, on a path defined before launch. The program defines that path, its hours and its fallback before a single call is answered.
- Where navigator support is included in scope, a Rely navigator personally works complex scheduling, coverage barriers, transportation, language and resource needs, and cases that need persistent coordination across days.
- Navigators are US-based and Rely-supervised. Whether navigator support is included, and which hours it covers, is defined for each program.
Required output
What the access record has to show
A report that shows only call volume, speed to answer and containment cannot answer the question a leader is actually asking, which is whether patients are getting in.
So each case returns the caller intent, the channel, the call type, the action taken, the owner, the final state, and where it was verified. That is what lets you compare a Tuesday morning with a Saturday night without pretending they are the same population.
- Intent and call type, captured in structured form rather than free text.
- Channel and hour, so coverage windows can be measured separately.
- Transfer target and acceptance, with the fallback taken if acceptance failed. A warm transfer nobody picked up is a failed transfer and is recorded as one.
- Scheduling result, verified against the source system. Booked in our record and absent from yours is a defect, reported as one.
- Barrier disposition, including barriers found that were out of scope to work.
Bring one access line.
One channel, one call type, one set of hours. We will map intent, owners, stops and the source system before anybody quotes a service level.