From: Horst Herb <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Outch. CLI is a complete failure
Now come on...
>up to 45% of all accepted calls in a medical practice NOT coming
>from the callers home place.
>Using CLI in that case would cause at least as much work as it would
save.
No, it wouldn't cause _any_ work.
It would shorten the time to acquire the correct set of electronic
notes in only 55 percent of clinical calls. Not entirely
unworthwhile.
hauling it back on topic, we hold 4 numbers at present, and have the
facility to hold others in another way. they are
homephone
workphone
fax
other - which is used for email in a few, or mobile number.
Holding a list of numbers ever called from (arising as a result over
time of patients calling from elsewhere than home, that number being
held and matched to the patient picked from the usual list during the
call) would steadily increase the proportion of matches up to a
limiting value imposed by the rate at which people change houses,
jobs, families and therefor phone numbers, and the natural proportion
calling from random phones. I think people tend to call us from
fairly fixed locations, actually - not from the train or a bus or in
the street. YMMV
"Hi, I'm on the train and I'd like to know when you can fit me in to
look at my piles" is thankfully not a yuppie blast I have heard on the
train...<g>
The sources of addresses and names to match can be more than one's own
accumulated list in a data table - there might be a CD or whatever -
as Horst mentions. Perhaps think in terms of a suitably secured
"person_finder_server" application running on the reception computer,
or the server, or _a_server as a component of a distributable
solution, which uses suitable bits of glue to pull information from
the various sources made available, the clinical system's demographics
being one of them, and serves it to whatever applications ask
(politely and securely I hope).
>Another problem is, that CLI is not available everywhere, and that
people increasingly opt out of the listing for some paranoid idea. It
is a dead fish for the moment.
ACR. Anonymous Caller Rejection is one solution, but it would be
unusual for a medical service to set the switch to reject all calls
with CLI disabled, at present.
(Digital Dot tells the caller "this number does not accept calls
without caller lin information, you have the choice of dialling the
prefix 1471 to release CLI for this call, or making a call from
another telephoine with CLI enabled." Being a telephone robot she
doesn't add " ... or writing a letter attending in person or just
giving up the whole idea" because those would not be conceivable.)
>> of course if there is nobody known to call from that number, or the
>> user witholds CLI, you do whatever you do at present.
>> And if there is only one known user there, up comes their notes,
for
>> you to check their ID of course "hello, is that Mr Smith? Ah, I
have
>> your notes right here..."
>
>Sounds good, and probably evn worth to implement, but I would not
expect much performance increase or decreased workload for the reasons
mentioned above. Maybe there is too large a difference between
countries and their phone systems, might work well in your country.
Increments is all there are, and usually small increments.
But we are aiming to nudge the times down from 5 sec to 4 sec and so
on... not to change the world.
--
Midgley
Credit where it is due - my briefing on this comes from the many
clever and expert people on CIX:telecomms www.cix.co.uk/
