Discovery Institute & CTM: How An Award-Winning Addiction Treatment Center Uses Call Tracking & Attribution to Reach Patients and Provide Care

Help Wanted: Reliable Reporting, Call Tracking, and Scalability 

When Discovery Institute, a New Jersey addiction treatment center, came to CTM in 2017, they were desperate for a new call tracking solution. Their current provider’s “atrocious” reporting and lack of scalability was preventing them from providing the highest-quality service possible to their growing roster of clients seeking both inpatient and outpatient care. 

With many patients and prospective patients in a growing community, Discovery Institute’s managers quickly discovered their need for a reliable software solution capable of: 

1. Tracking and attributing thousands of HIPAA-compliant communications per month
2. Scaling alongside Discovery itself with robust data reports and functionality
3. Supporting a hybrid contact center staff

Adopting CTM has been a game-changer for Discovery Institute, which is why we sat down with Marisa Disisto, Discovery Institute’s Contact Center Manager, and Sean Garcia, Director of Business Development and Marketing, to learn more about how they came to CallTrackingMetrics (CTM) and the creative ways they’re using our software to reach those in need of addiction treatment, counseling, and other behavioral healthcare services.

“CallTrackingMetrics has really allowed us to see things from both a 30,000 foot view, as well as  a granular perspective, and take a look at each case as its own unique situation.

It’s improved our workflow in a way that allows us to give each potential member of our program the attention to detail they deserve when going through some of the hardest times of their life.”

– Sean Garcia, Director of Business Development & Marketing, Discovery Institute

Discovery Institute’s been providing top-notch addiction treatment care to their local community for the past 53 years, and, with the help of CTM, will do so for another 50! Thanks to their dedication to patient care and their innovative use of technology and software in their growth trajectory, Discovery Institute was voted Newsweek’s America’s Best Addiction Treatment Center award two years in a row. 

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Problem One: Too Many Calls, Not Enough Routing

The front desk staffer was exasperated. 

Instead of welcoming and directing new patients, dealing with vendors, and helping fellow employees, the front desk was answering calls. Thousands of them. 

After answering and manually directing thousands of phone calls a month (all of which had to be individually forwarded to the right departments), the front desk staffer had no bandwidth to act as the first welcoming point of contact at Discovery. 

On any given day callers might phone in looking for their counselor or the billing department. They might have a question about their medical records or insurance, or be calling in the throes of an addiction crisis. It might be a girlfriend looking to chat with their inpatient boyfriend, or a family member with a list of questions about addiction intervention.

Often, callers are prospective patients seeking help. As they grow more and more nervous waiting for their call to be picked up, they hang up, and the opportunity and desire for treatment is gone.
Lacking an efficient system to route, track, record, call back, or contact these various calls, the center was missing crucial opportunities to connect and offer treatment options to prospective patients and their families in need of help. 

Solution: Call Routing

Now, every call to Discovery  is filtered through the CTM-powered contact center, where the first contact a struggling patient makes can qualify the patient for the help they are seeking. The contact center representative gathers necessary information on the caller’s demographics and medical coverage, checks for eligibility, processes applications for Medicaid and state funding, and more. From there, the caller can quickly be routed to the correct department to chat with a specialized representative to schedule their intake.  

Result: A Faster Path to Care

By adopting CTM, Discovery Institute was able to quickly resolve the issue of the front desk acting as a call center. Disisto now uses CTM to effectively manage and route the 2,500-3,500 phone calls made to the institute every month with smart routing, unique trigger automation, and a few other special CTM tools via Discovery Institute’s contact center. Well-planned call routing not only saves time for Discovery Institute employees, it also gives clients prompt and personalized care in their moments of need. 

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Problem Two: Missed Connections with Prospective Patients

Several difficult situations specific to detox, addiction treatment, and behavioral health center communication include callers that are:

1. Too anxious or distressed to complete a call or wait on the line
2. Intoxicated or otherwise incoherent due to substance use
3. Experiencing a crisis situation requiring immediate medical attention or intervention
4. Reluctant to start or continue treatment, despite provable need
5. Unable or unwilling to take phone calls at all

These situations are widespread in the industry, but Discovery Institute uses CTM in some unique ways to overcome these kinds of roadblocks. 

Solution: Smart Dialer & Texting

Smart routing helps Discovery Institute drastically cut down on missed calls, but even the most efficient contact centers will face the need for callbacks.  Reaching back out to the caller quickly after they’ve hung up or abandoned the call helps connect them to resources and  treatment when they need it most. Using CTM’s Smart Dialer, Discovery Institute automatically initiates a callback to any missed call number within two minutes. If the callback is unanswered, they’re able to sync all relevant details into their Salesforce instance using the CTM integration where they can trigger a follow up task to remind them to reach out.  

When talking on the phone isn’t an option, Discovery Institute’s team makes use of text messaging to reach struggling patients, and communicate with current ones. Patients can submit forms and paperwork by replying with a photo to communicate critical information. 

Result: No One Falls Through the Cracks 

No matter whether a patient relies on phone calls, texts, or chats, CTM’s Smart Dialer and HIPAA-compliant texting and chat allows patients to share personal details, medical information, and photos in a safe and secure process. No matter which channel of communication is being used, both patients and staff at the institute can confidently exchange necessary information and get the recovery process started.

This way, as Marisa says, “no one falls through the cracks” when seeking treatment and “every patient automatically gets reached back out to.” 

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Problem Three: Inconsistent Experience Caused by Insufficient Context

Often, patients (or their friends and family) try calling their counselor or a patient after-hours. In the past, any institute staff member available would take the call and perform to the best of their ability. However, without knowing the intimate details of a patient’s recovery process, that staff member might direct it improperly, not knowing that patient’s unique needs.

Also, it is not uncommon for callers to be in crisis. Sometimes, a caller’s situation or distress might warrant an escalation to clinical staff or require notifying the police.  

Solution: Call Recordings & Transcriptions

Using CTM, after-hour calls set off a trigger to record the message, transcribe it, and email that transcription to a patient’s counselor. This means every counselor can start their day addressing their patients’ after-hour concerns and responding as soon as possible. By linking every call directly to the counselor in a patient’s case, Discovery Institute ensures that only those with direct knowledge of a patient’s unique situation address their calls. Rather than staff members unfamiliar with a patient’s personal situation handling these after-hour calls, they go straight to their counselor’s inbox in a tidy transcript.

In the case of a crisis call, Discovery Institute configured CTM to automatically record every call. These call recordings can be used to assess and prove that a caller is in crisis and help institute staff members decide on a course of action. A recording helps direct specific next steps to get the caller the help they need.

Result: More Connection, Less Frustration

Call recordings and transcription triggers provide meaningful solutions that both cut down on administrative time waste and lowers the likelihood of a patient feeling frustrated in their recovery process, or helpless in a crisis.

With automatic HIPAA compliant call recordings and transcriptions, Discovery Institute can communicate a caller’s situation with different departments and authorities while upholding medical privacy laws. 

Lastly, another benefit of recordings is their use during treatment. If a caller becomes a patient and forgets the level of crisis that necessitated their intake, a call recording can be a powerful tool in encouraging continued detox. Hearing themselves at their own turning point can help patients recognize how far they’ve come and how far they still have to go.

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Problem Four:  Scaling with a Hybrid Staff

Though Discovery Institute is located in New Jersey, like so many behavioral health centers, organizations, and businesses today, their contact center staff live across the country – and their number of employees (and remote employees) continues to grow. With contact center employees living across time zones, and facility staff working onsite with the patients, reliably connecting clients and family to the right person via phone call required a solution designed to keep hybrid workforces connected and productive. 

Solution: More Agents and Live Views

To ensure that hybrid staff are equally plugged in, Disisto made the ingenious decision to make every single staff member at Discovery Institute an Agent in CTM. This means that anytime a call comes through, every staff member can receive a forwarded call directly, making it a very “customer-friendly service workflow.” 

“From a management perspective, my entire contact center team is remote across the country. I can see in real time what everyone is doing, who they are on a call with, listen live, monitor the queue, watch for incoming texts and chats, route overflow calls,  set up auto dialers for missed calls or call lists in down time and set up triggers for salesforce reporting.”

-Marisa Disisto, Contact Center Manager, Discovery Institute

Result: Personalized Care with Room to Scale

With a reliable call tracking and marketing attribution provider, all remote employees are able to connect in real time and answer calls, chats, and texts from wherever they are physically located. This flexibility will continue right alongside Discovery Institute’s continued growth trajectory as counselors, contact center staff, managers, and other employees work onsite, hybrid, or fully remote. 

Having this direct connection to every single staff member, through CTM’s agent structure, has drastically reduced the amount of overall administrative work needed. Instead, each patient and their family have direct access to the staff members with intimate knowledge of their individual recovery process, payment arrangements, and needs; no caller is forced to repeat their information over and over again with a new staffer. Rather, they can chat with the staff member assigned to them with little difficulty, which in turn reduces time wasted on extra administrative tasks and improves client satisfaction. 

This level of direct, personalized care, as facilitated by a call tracking system and hybrid staff, is one of the solutions that sets Discovery Institute apart from other treatment and rehabilitation facilities. According to Sean, “it’s super unique in our industry to utilize a platform like this — these platforms aren’t necessarily built for our industry.”  

Thankfully, the results speak for themselves. Hopefully more treatment centers begin to consider call tracking solutions as part of a holistic approach to patient intake and treatment. 

America’s Best Addiction Treatment Center Uses CallTrackingMetrics to Provide Best-in-Class Care

Treatment centers, such as the Discovery Institute, are more important than ever to our local communities. With nearly 15 million people in the United States suffering from alcohol use disorder (AUD) and nearly one-million deaths by drug overdoses reported in the past two decades, effective and compassionate addiction treatment is needed more than ever before.

Call tracking and attribution is a surprising way that treatment centers can help address these sobering statistics in the industry.

As drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers continue expanding their services and addressing a wide range of patient needs every day, the technology and tools used to help people must be both reliable and sophisticated. Any call, text, or chat might require staff to make quick and compassionate decisions.  In these moments, CTM’s many tools, from HIPAA compliant call recordings and transcriptions to smart dialers and routing, connect clients and their families to the exact help they need in those pivotal life moments.

If you’re looking to improve patient care and communication, scale with a hybrid staff, and revolutionize administrative workflows at your healthcare organization, book a demo and see what CTM can do for you!