Collaborative Health Partners, a multi-site practice group in central Virginia, cut phone hold times that once ran as long as 30 minutes and lifted patient satisfaction scores tied to phone access by 65%, after rolling out Parlance across 15 locations. The organization reduced its dedicated phone staff by 11 FTEs through attrition, without a single layoff, while call volume held steady at more than 400,000 calls a year.
Phone hold times used to be the number one complaint on every quarterly patient survey. Today, it doesn’t register at all. 75.3% of the practice group’s calls are now routed or self-served instead of waiting in queue, and patients can reschedule, cancel, or ask questions any time, day or night, without needing to reach a staff member directly.
Valerie Daugherty, Director of Patient Access, Collaborative Health Partners, and Katie Cardarelli, Head of Customer Operations, Parlance, walk through what made the rollout work: a phased go-live strategy, a shared lessons-learned workbook that cut later go-lives down to just 2 to 4 hours, and a partnership built on communication that didn’t disappear after the contract was signed.