Launching Teleconsultation for 1200 Patients in 48 Hours

When COVID-19 forced a busy eye care hospital to suspend in-person visits, it needed a healthcare call center solution that could quickly get patients back in front of consultants. Here’s how a not-for-profit hospital built a fully working teleconsultation service in 48 hours and reached 1,200 patients within the first 10 days.

The Client

The customer is a not-for-profit, mission-driven ophthalmic care provider headquartered in Chennai, with about 1,000 employees serving roughly 1,200 patients and performing 100 surgeries a day. At any given time, the hospital also had more than 3,000 surgeries awaiting final follow-up from its consultants.

When the pandemic hit, the hospital had to cancel thousands of in-person appointments and restrict visits to emergency cases only, suspending non-emergency outpatient services and surgeries. Rather than leave existing patients without care, the hospital committed to serving them as well as it could, and set out to build a healthcare teleconsultation platform practically overnight.

For a provider built around continuity of care, canceling that many appointments wasn’t just an inconvenience; it risked patients going without follow-up they genuinely needed.

The Challenge

With outpatient visits suspended, thousands of patients who needed surgery follow-ups and regular check-ups had no way to see their consultant. The hospital didn’t want to leave them behind, but building a remote care option from scratch is rarely simple, and the hospital gave itself almost no time to do it.

The biggest constraint was speed: the hospital wanted its entire teleconsulting operation up and running in just 48 hours, addressing patient needs without delay. That meant solving several problems at once:

1. Letting patients book appointments across every location, based on real consultant availability.
2. Verifying patient identity and pulling the right medical history before every consultation.
3. Reaching patients reliably to schedule, confirm, and reconfirm appointments, since a missed consultant slot was time the hospital couldn’t get back.
4. Capturing patient feedback and consultation recordings without adding manual work for already-stretched consultants.

Any solution also had to work for patients who weren’t comfortable with technology, since eye care skews toward an older, less digitally fluent patient base.

The Solution

The hospital built its teleconsulting service around ClearTouch’s healthcare call center solution, standing up the entire setup within the 48-hour window it had given itself.

Patients could schedule teleconsultations through a plugin on the hospital’s website, choosing video consulting or a phone-based session based on consultant availability at any location. Access was limited to patients with a valid Medical Record Number, letting consultants pull the right patient history from the hospital’s Electronic Medical Records before every call.

To reach patients who hadn’t yet booked, the hospital used automated SMS and voice messages, a healthcare cloud telephony capability that prompted people due for a surgery follow-up or regular check-up to schedule a teleconsulting session, then confirmed the appointment once they accepted. Patient appointment reminders followed the same pattern: voice and SMS messages that reconfirmed or rescheduled each booking, protecting consultant time from no-shows through automated appointment confirmation.

All voice communication ran through a cloud telephony service that dialed the patient at the scheduled time and connected them directly to the consultant, with no secretary interface required. ClearTouch also provided teleconsultation call recording, so consultants could attach a session recording directly to the patient’s EMR record, and supported patient feedback collection through the same voice messaging platform. Each consultant worked from a single dashboard showing every upcoming appointment, the patient’s name and MRN, and whether the session was video or phone-based.

Benefits

Moving to a healthcare teleconsultation platform gave the hospital a way to keep serving patients without in-person visits:

1. Rapid deployment: The full teleconsulting operation was live within 48 hours, with no gap in patient care.
2. Flexible consultation options: Patients could choose video or phone-based consultations depending on comfort and connectivity.
3. Secure, verified access: Medical Record Number verification kept teleconsultations tied to accurate patient history from the EMR.
4. Fewer missed appointments: Automated appointment confirmation and patient appointment reminders reduced no-shows and protected consultant time.
5. Built-in documentation: Teleconsultation call recording let consultants attach session recordings directly to patient records.
6. Ongoing insight: Patient feedback collection gave the hospital a continuous read on how the teleconsulting experience was landing.

Results & Outcomes

Within 10 days of going live, the hospital’s healthcare call center solution had already become part of daily patient care:

1. About 1,200 patients consulted through the teleconsulting platform in the first 10 days alone.
2. Full teleconsulting rollout completed in 48 hours, with zero disruption to patients needing follow-up care.
3. Consultation volume continued climbing after launch, with the hospital expecting teleconsulting to become a standing part of its follow-up care model.
4. Every consultation backed by call recording and reminder-driven scheduling, reducing no-shows and keeping documentation consistent.
5. A foundation for deeper EMR integration, which the hospital and ClearTouch continue to build toward together.

These results gave the hospital a way to keep serving existing patients through a crisis, and a model it can keep using long after in-person visits resume.

For a hospital built around continuity of care, that volume in just over a week was proof the model could hold up at scale.