Chained to the desk, have to stick to the schedule (i.e. take breaks and lunch at pre-scheduled times) and expectation is that you're 95% compliant with your schedule. All calls are monitored and there are multiple metrics to meet at 80% or better. Most patients don't know that when they call their clinic, they're actually talking to a call center person who might not even live in the same city. Trying to give instructions to a clinic in CO Springs or FoCo when I live in [not your business] was always awkward as I frantically Google Map directions. Some patients do know that it's a call center so they immediately ask to be transferred to the clinic but per the rules, you're not supposed to just transfer and first have to probe what the patient needs and wait for them to ask a second time to be transferred. Training is very focused on scheduling and creating patient charts, but I'd say most calls are to leave various messages about referrals, orders, questions, medication refills, or paperwork. To echo another review, in this position you are the punching bag for patients to yell at you for something you have no knowledge of (because you don't even work at the clinic!); and you are expected to be compassionate and apologize and offer solutions (there are none). The scheduling that you can do is the exact same that patients can self-schedule using the app, however many call expecting that you have more availability (you don't). You can look at a provider schedule and see that they're wide open but all their slots are 'frozen' which means only the clinic employees can schedule in them. This creates an unnecessary chain of events that wastes everyone's time because your patient is unhappy with the appointment availability, you can't help them, so you send a message to the clinic, which will take anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days to get back to the patient. There is almost non-existent availability for appointments if the patient has medicare or medicaid as UCHealth has only a certain number of slots for these types of patients.
