Client story

One Step Diagnostic stopped calling patients. 20,000 a year now book themselves.

A multi-site Houston network seeing more than 100,000 patients a year. A faxed order used to mean a 24-hour wait for a phone call. It now becomes a text in under two minutes, and the patient books the appointment themselves.

Multi-siteHouston, Texas100,000+ patients a year

Faraz Faiz

Director of Operations,
One Step Diagnostic

+4 more on the record ↓

Jump to a chapter8 chapters

On the record

Five people from one network, on the day the phone went quiet.

Operations first, because the numbers are his. Then the two people who feel it most (scheduling and the front desk) and the billing pair who stopped transferring callers.

Operations

the person whose numbers moved

1 interview

Faraz Faiz

Director of Operations

Runs operations

“Being able to grab all the faxes in real time… and get patients on the schedule and get them a text message so they can schedule on their own within five to 10 minutes is an amazing feature that no other software that we’ve ever used has.”

100,000+patients a year across the network

~20%of Houston patients now book themselves

20–30%more imaging throughput, every modality

In the interview: what changed across every modality once the phone stopped being the only route in

The floor

scheduling and the front desk, where the calls used to land

2 interviews

Runs scheduling5:56

Martha Guzman

Office Manager, Scheduling

“When the intakes are putting orders, it’s less than a minute, two minutes, they’re getting messages, we receive your order. That’s a lot of help, because when we didn’t have that it was like a 24 hours for them to get like a call from us.”

In the interview: the wait between an order arriving and a patient hearing anything

Runs the front desk5:56

Karen Perez

Front Desk Administrator, all centers

“When I talk to my closers at night, they find it a lot easier to help them close out for the night, as far as what patients have been completed, what patients have been canceled and rescheduled.”

In the interview: what the end of the day looks like across every center

The money

billing and collections, on the transfer that stopped happening

Two people, same department, same relief.

2 interviews

Takes the payment

“We’re able to do the payments on the same portal, because before we would have to contact someone else to do it. Now we can just go to a specific center and process patient’s payments or insurance payments.”

In the interview: why a patient is no longer transferred three times to pay a bill

Arely García

Billing and Collections

Bills and collects

“It was more easier to find all their demographics and all their papers that are scanned in that we needed to research. It’s all in one little thing and we didn’t have to open multiple pages.”

In the interview: what a billing researcher stopped having to open

Rosa Bosquez

Billing and Collections

The facility

Walk a Houston center the way a patient moves through it.

Five and a half minutes through a Houston center and the corporate hub: check-in, the mammography suite, the scheduling floor and the reading room, with the platform on screen throughout.

Order incaptured from the fax in real time

Text outthe patient books their own slot

Check-indigital forms, no paperwork

The scanstatus tracked as it happens

Billingpayment taken on the same portal

24 hours

to hear anything,
on the old system

2–3 days

how far behind
intake used to run

Under 2 min

from order received
to the text going out

01 · The wait

A day before anybody called you back

An order arrived by fax and somebody had to scan it, key it and then telephone the patient. At more than a hundred thousand patients a year that queue only goes one way: intake ran two to three days behind, and a patient waited about twenty-four hours to hear anything at all.

Faxed orders scanned and keyed by hand before anyone could act
Every appointment made by an outbound phone call
Callers transferred between departments to make a payment

02 · The switch

The fax becomes a text, and the patient books it

Inbound orders are now captured as they arrive, and the patient gets a message within a minute or two saying the order has been received, with a link to book. Roughly one in five Houston patients takes it, about twenty thousand appointments a year that nobody had to phone. Referrers get told automatically when an order is received, scheduled, rescheduled or canceled.

Orders captured from the fax in real time, not scanned in
Patient texted within a minute or two, and books their own slot
Referring doctors and attorneys notified automatically at every step
Pre-registration and insurance handled by SMS before the visit

Why it matters

“That’s almost 20,000 patients being able to schedule just on their own, with my staff not having to pick up the phone and call them.”

Faraz Faiz, Director of Operations
One Step Diagnostic

03 · What it freed

Nobody gets transferred three times

Billing takes the payment on the same portal instead of routing the caller to whichever center holds the file. A researcher finds the demographics and the scanned paperwork on one page rather than opening several. And at the end of the day the front desk closes out from a single view of what completed, canceled and rescheduled.

Payments taken on the same portal, at any center
Demographics and scanned documents on one page
Night close from one view, emailed to administrators
An audit trail showing who did what to an account

Umair Silat, on screening follow-up.

One Step’s Director of Digital Services took a TechTalks panel through the breast and lung screening workflow: the recommendation read off the dictated report, the letter written from it, and the critical findings pulled to the front of the queue. Separate series, registration required.

TechTalks Ep. 6AI WorkflowsUmair Silat on surfacing a critical finding out of the screening queueRegister for the full episode →

One Step Diagnostic stopped calling patients. 20,000 a year now book themselves.