Multi-Site Cardiology Call Volume, Department by Department

Multi-site cardiology call volume is almost always reported as one number, because one number is what the phone system produces. The group answered so many calls, abandoned so many, held for so long. Every administrator running more than two offices knows that number is describing something that does not exist. Nobody calls the group. They call a location, about a provider who sits at one or two of them, for a visit type that only half your sites can hold.

The published main line is a funnel into offices that run on different rules. One site has an imaging suite and a device clinic. One is a satellite with a cardiologist two days a week. One shares a building with another specialty and has its own front desk habits going back a decade.

When the group average looks acceptable, it is usually because a well staffed site is subsidising the reporting of a site that is quietly failing. The satellite with one and a half front desk people is where calls go unanswered, and it is the site whose patients are hardest to recover, because the next available slot there is weeks out.

So the operational question is not how many calls the practice takes. It is which department each call was really for, and whether that department could answer it.

Departments are the unit, not the practice

athenaOne already carves your group into departments, and that structure is doing more work than most administrators use it for. A department carries its own schedule, its own appointment types, its own hours, and its own booked appointment list. It is the closest thing you have to a real operating unit.

A call arrives without any of that context. The patient dialed one number and wants a stress test sometime in the next two weeks. Whether that is a booking, a transfer, or a callback depends entirely on which department could actually deliver it.

That is the routing problem, and it is administrative rather than clinical. The automation works out which department a call belongs to using the patient’s existing bookings, the provider they name, and the visit type they are asking for. Then it works the booked appointment lists for the departments that can hold that visit, rather than searching the group as an undifferentiated pool.

The difference is visible on day one in a place administrators rarely look. Calls stop being routed to the site that answers fastest and start being routed to the site that can see the patient soonest, which are almost never the same site.

The phone load is not evenly distributed and neither is what it is made of

Phone work is still where the staff time goes, and the mix matters more than the count. A March 10, 2026, MGMA Stat poll asked practice leaders which phone tasks consume the most staff time. Eligibility and prior authorization came first at 45%, then scheduling at 31%, intake at 9%, prescription refills at 6%, and an other category at 9%. The poll had 294 applicable responses.

In a cardiology group that mix is not uniform across your sites. The office attached to the imaging suite carries the authorization load, because that is where the stress tests and the advanced imaging get booked. The satellite carries scheduling and refill traffic. Averaging those together produces a staffing plan that is wrong at both ends.

Read per department and you can size the automation the same way. Authorization status chasing runs hard where procedures are booked. Refill request intake and routing runs hard where the follow up panel lives. Neither of those requires the AI to make a clinical call. Refill requests get captured and routed into the clinical staff queue that owns them, and results callbacks get scheduled for a clinician rather than answered by anyone else.

That is the same argument as measuring access one site at a time, applied to the inbound side rather than the reporting side.

The complication: the roster in the chart disagrees with the roster on the wall

There is a specific failure that shows up in every multi-site rollout and it is never in the project plan. The chart’s primary provider field is stale almost everywhere, so it cannot be trusted to route a caller to their own cardiologist. The provider roster on the practice website and the roster configured in the EHR also disagree, usually because someone left, someone joined, and only one of the two lists got updated.

A patient calls the main line and asks for the doctor they have been seeing for six years. If the routing reads the primary provider field, a meaningful share of those calls go to the wrong department. If it reads the website, a few go to somebody who does not work there any more.

The fallback that actually holds up is behavioural. Look at who has recently seen the patient, in which department, rather than at who is nominally assigned to them. That is a booked appointment history question and it is right far more often than the field is.

Reconciling the two rosters is step one of any deployment, and it is a human job. Somebody at your practice has to sit down and confirm who works there, at which sites, taking which visit types. The automation cannot infer that and should not try. What it can do afterwards is keep routing against actual visit history so the answer does not rot again the next time someone changes offices.

One call, two departments, and the booking that never happened

Cardiology runs a lot of paired work. A study is booked alongside a provider visit, or a device check alongside a follow up. The patient calling does not describe it that way. They ask to see the doctor, or they ask about the test, and the other half is implied.

The failure mode here is quiet. Someone books one leg and not the other, and the second half of the workflow does not exist until a person catches it in review. It gets worse across sites, because the two legs may belong to different departments with different templates and different lead times, so the person booking the first one cannot see the second.

Native reminders make it worse again. They fire on the chronologically first appointment, so a patient with a morning study and a mid morning provider visit gets reminded about one of them.

Working the booked lists across departments together is what closes that. When the automation books a study at the site with the equipment, it checks for the paired provider visit in the department that owns it, offers both in the same call, and confirms both afterwards. When only one leg can be offered, it says so plainly on the call rather than booking half a workflow and leaving the rest to a callback that may not happen. The same shape shows up in device and rhythm clinic scheduling, where the second visit is the whole point.

What to measure once the phones are covered

Patient access is where practice leaders say their attention is going, and phone access is a large slice of it. A Dec. 9, 2025, MGMA Stat poll asked medical practice leaders what their top patient access focus would be in 2026. No-shows came first at 27%, then online scheduling at 24%, phone access at 22%, and wait times at 21%, with other at 5%. The poll had 236 applicable responses.

If you are running several cardiology sites, resolve to read every one of those per department. A group abandonment rate is a blend. A department abandonment rate is a staffing decision. Same for time to next available, which is the number that decides whether a recovered call turns into a visit.

The handoff rules stay explicit and they stay boring. Anything that sounds like a symptom or a clinical question goes to your clinical staff, immediately and with the call context attached, and the AI does not assess it or rank it. Anything involving a plan the booked provider does not take goes to a person. Everything else, which is most of a cardiology phone day, is booking, rescheduling, authorization status, refill intake, and telling a patient what time to arrive.

Start from running the cardiology phones end to end and then split the reporting by department. The second step is what tells you where to put the next front desk hire, or whether you need one.

Key Takeaways

Report call volume, abandonment, and time to next available per athenaOne department, because a group average hides the site that is failing.
Route a call by which department can actually deliver the visit type, not by which site answers fastest.
Do not trust the chart’s primary provider field for routing, and reconcile the website roster against the configured roster before go-live.
Route by who has recently seen the patient and in which department, which survives staffing changes better than an assigned field.
Book paired studies and provider visits together across departments, and confirm both, because native reminders fire on the first appointment only.
Hand any symptom or clinical question straight to clinical staff with the call context attached, and keep the automation on booking and paperwork.

A multi-site cardiology group does not have a phone problem, it has several, and they do not look alike. Split the volume by department, route on what each department can deliver, reconcile the rosters before you automate anything, and book the paired visits in one call instead of two. The group number will improve either way. The useful part is that you will finally know which site improved it and which one was carrying the average.

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