Case Study — AfterOurs Urgent Care

AfterOurs Urgent Care clinics provide medical treatment for all non-life-threatening conditions after the offices of primary care physicians are closed. By being the most trusted solution for extended hour acute urgent care services across California and Colorado, client service is their business focus. Yodel supports them in this aspect by delivering a customizable phone solution.

We talked to Dan McDermott, Executive Director of Information Systems and Revenue Management.

What was the ultimate goal that you wanted to achieve with a phone system?

In one word: improve. The goal was to reduce cost while improving functionality and transparency.

McDermott about Yodel:

I would say Yodel is a mixture of functionality, transparency, and ease of use. It collectively saves our company much more time and money than other solutions did. It’s a more cost-effective solution because it’s more aligned with how we operate. We have been around the block. We had Jive and most recently had RingCentral before switching to Yodel.

AfterOurs Urgent care started with one out of five locations to implement Yodel as their main phone system. After seeing how much Yodel improved the communication with their clients and eased the phone call tasks for the employees, Yodel was implemented in two other locations shortly after. An increase in communication between the location’s employees was also measured since the implementation. With over 2000 calls weekly and in combination with their Slack tool, Yodel proved to be the right fit for AfterOurs Urgent Care.

Yodel can grow with a business, at their own pace and at any time.

How easy was it for your employees to understand how Yodel works and how long did it take to fully implement it within the team?

Each person is unique but it is a short learning curve. The learning curve depends on Slack use prior to Yodel. Engaged Slack users learned Yodel in a couple minutes while others took a couple times using it before they remember the entry point (slash command). Full implementation was about a week and only so long due to many part-timers.

How was it like when your Yodel usage increased with the system being implemented to the 2nd and 3rd clinic?

Impactful to get everyone on the same solution. Once they use the solution more, the impact will grow as the old barriers are actually torn down and people are collaborating making satisfying a client’s need or issue seamlessly. It’s very convenient for us to be able to loop in other people from other locations or somebody else to be able to easily, quickly and seamlessly get everybody all on the same call.

When asked Dan McDermott how Yodel gives the callers a personalized experienced, he said:

By enabling us to move away from a numbered phone tree to a natural word spaced environment and providing us the capabilities to seamlessly share calls and quickly get our clients’ problems solved and questions answered.

Dan McDermott holds a Bachelor of Business Degree and is originally from Baxter, Iowa. Now McDermott is the Executive Director of Revenue and Information Systems at AfterOurs Urgent Care for over 14 years in the greater Denver area with experience in revenue cycle management, organization management, and information technology.

His expertise lays in healthcare revenue cycle structure and management as well as an information system from selection to deployment and operational management. He has successfully formulated and helped implement restructuring strategies covering company-wide information systems and revenue cycle management. His favorite part of taking care of people is that he loves talking to patients about the way they can save on healthcare costs and the improvements in healthcare. In his spare time, he loves spending time with his family on a sunny beach.