Case Study
Turning Point Las Cruces Connects Patients and Staff with Real-Time Communication Platform
Discover how Turning Point achieved seamless communication, streamlined patient care, and better staff collaboration with TigerConnect.
Overview
Turning Point Las Cruces is a women’s healthcare service in Las Cruces, New Mexico, focused on helping women navigate their pregnancies medically and emotionally. The pregnancy care clinic offers free pregnancy testing, ultrasounds, obstetric care and counseling, providing women complete information about all their options.
Patient communication is a major component of the relationship between patients and caregivers. Turning Point turned to TigerConnect in search of a robust, all-in-one solution that could ease communication between staff and patients.
The Challenge: Connecting staff and patients efficiently
Staying coordinated with each other and connected to patients was a challenge for the Turning Point staff. The clinic was struggling to accommodate patients’ communication preferences while balancing the varying schedules of the nursing staff. For instance, they maintained an after-hours message-taking service on the clinic’s office line. Yet, that external service could not effectively manage nursing schedules or patient needs, so the messages still needed manual follow-up.
Turning Point also experimented with what they called “the nurse phone,” a single smartphone that they shared and passed around between staff. This shared device meant that any nurse who held the phone could see every single patient’s information and past messages, allowing them to be in regular text contact with their patients when it was their turn. However, only one nurse held the phone at a time, and it was not secure.
“On my day, I had to scroll back to find my last texts with my patients and see if they had answered me. It was not a good system, and we were all very frustrated with that.”
— Cheri Love,
Nurse Manager, Turning Point
The Solution: Using TigerConnect to Securely Link Staff and Patients
Turning Point adopted TigerConnect Patient Engagement to securely communicate with patients via text, video, or phone calls. A patient queue allows staff to address incoming patient inquiries, conduct virtual check-ins, and notify providers when a patient is ready. This process helped Turning Point address their various workflow and client communication challenges. The staff uses TigerConnect on both their laptops and smartphones, making for a much more convenient and easy-to-use system.
TigerConnect allowed Turning Point to centralize communication among staff and with patients. Everyone can message each other securely, knowing TigerConnect is HIPAA-compliant, with patient information and other updates on scheduling, regardless of where they are, using their own phones.
The virtual Waiting Room feature allows potential patients to contact them, with dedicated staff taking turns monitoring to ensure prompt responses. TigerConnect eliminated inefficiencies of the nurse phone and allows staff to create greater separation for their time off since everyone has access to information equally without phoning during off hours.
The Result
The adoption of TigerConnect changed the way Turning Point operates. Instead of the phone tag of the old system, Love has tracked 1,000 text messages passing between staff and patients over a two-month period.
The number of patients seen doubled by using TigerConnect Patient Engagement to communicate, resulting in a significant uptick in monthly pregnancy tests and ultrasounds performed. Since implementing TigerConnect, Turning Point reduced appointment no-shows by 5%. The Waiting Room feature has also enhanced the ability to schedule new patients, with the clinic tracking a decrease in calls coming into the facility and a corresponding increase in the new-patient usage of the Waiting Room feature.
“It’s so easy to stay in touch with patients through TigerConnect. We just love it. We have confidence that when it’s our day off, patient conversations can keep going with the on-duty nurse. Everything is going to be handled without us there.”
— Cheri Love,
Nurse Manager, Turning Point
