Dear Colleagues,
As a large nor’easter approaches Connecticut, Yale Medical Group (YMG)’s and Yale-New Haven Hospital’s emergency management teams have decided it is in the best interest of our patients, staff, and faculty to cancel all ambulatory clinics on Tuesday, January 27, 2015.
We need your help in communicating this information as quickly and efficiently as possible. First, all employees supporting critical functions should stay in touch with their managers. In addition:
Our Televox system now has a process for sending automated cancellation calls to every patient who received a reminder call. This file is already prepared and ready to be sent. Any practice which does not currently utilize Televox for reminder calls will be responsible for contacting all their patients. Here is the message patients receiving the cancellation call will hear:
Hello, this is Yale Medical Group calling to inform (Patient’s First Name Merge) that we need to cancel your appointment on (Date Merge) due to inclement weather. Our office will contact you to reschedule your appointment, but if you have a medical emergency in the meantime please call 911. We apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you.
To confirm you received this message, please press 1.
To repeat this message, please press 3.
Thank you for confirming that you have received this message. Again, our office will contact you to reschedule your appointment.
Please make sure your answering service and all voicemail boxes for which patients have numbers have a consistent and specific message apologizing for any inconvenience and indicating that your office will contact them to reschedule. Answering services should be instructed to use the language prepared for our Televox system (above).
In addition, you should confirm your on-call schedules today for Tuesday and into Wednesday morning to make sure you have appropriate coverage for patients calling with medical concerns.
There will be a joint YMG/YNHH ambulatory conference call tomorrow at 5 p.m. to review conditions and make any scheduling change decisions for Wednesday. As a reminder, please see the attached clinic cancellation policy approved by all clinical chairs.
University updates, if any, will also be listed on our emergency page http://emergency.yale.edu. If you have questions or concerns, please direct them to your manager or supervisor.
Thank you very much for your cooperation.