Patient Contact Project

An initiative to improve your experience contacting Fenway Health.

Last Updated: December 1, 2022

If you are a Fenway Health patient, you may be able to relate to this feedback we’ve received:

“The phone menu is too long and confusing.”
“The patient portal is not easy to use.”
“It takes too long to get medications and refills.”
“I just want to get a person on the phone who can help me!”

We Hear You!

To address these concerns and create an improved, patient-centered contact experience for our health center, we’ve launched what we’ve termed the “Patient Contact Project”.

What is the Patient Contact Project?

In November 2021, a multidisciplinary team was formed to design a system to respond to patient requests at the point of contact, with the fewest number of handoffs possible. The systems under revision include our medical call center, phone tree, patient portal, and prescription refill/prior authorization workflow.

What improvements are being made?

There will be significantly fewer automated phone options when calling into Fenway, allowing callers to reach a live person much quicker. In late March, we implemented our first round of phone tree updates, which included the removal of redundant and unnecessary menu options.
We plan to launch a centralized call center for the medical department. Our goal in this initiative is first call resolution. The medical call center representative will be able to assist you from start to finish, or hand you off to the correct person to best meet your needs.
We are in the recruiting process to staff our centralized call center for the medical department and expect to begin implementation in the next few months.

We have just finished the process of migrating to a new electronic health record platform, which includes a significantly improved patient portal
In the interim, we streamlined the portal’s interface by removing outdated information and extraneous web boxes. We also updated our portal instructions and published a link to an instruction guide, available at myfenway.org.
To improve response time to requests submitted through the patient portal, medical assistants are now trained to screen and address most incoming messages or direct them to the necessary member of your care team.
Our new patient portal went live on December 1st, 2022. You can sign-up at fenwayhealth.org/mychart.

We are creating a team specifically dedicated to prescription prior authorizations and are making other improvements to the refill process to increase efficiency.
Our clinical refill/renewal guidelines were recently updated to improve turnaround time.
Medical Assistants are now trained to ask you about medication refill needs at the time of your office visit, to help ensure your refills are processed in a timely manner. This will eliminate the need for you to call back in after your visit to request a refill.

As these improvements are implemented, we value your feedback. Patients are always welcome to submit compliments, concerns, or suggestions through our website fenwayhealth.org, scroll to the bottom of the home page, and click “give us your feedback” or click the button below. We will continue to keep you updated as we progress towards our goal.