Ivey Home Health Care provides high-quality home health care services including nursing, therapy, social work, dietetics, and durable medical equipment as well as pre and post-natal care for mothers and infants. Ivey is fully accredited with commendation by the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO). They fill a huge need for high-quality, cost-effective home health care in the communities it serves.

During a recent hurricane, Ivey's quality assurance standards were put to the test. Salt water damaged the power grid. Power lines were so heavily coated with ocean salts that they broke under the weight. Electrical power, where it existed at all, was spotty and unreliable.

Ivey's clients and patients include many persons with limited mobility, new mothers, and many elderly persons who need assistance with daily living. The staff at Ivey provide a range of services from skilled nursing for post-operative recoveries, ventilator-dependent care, or terminal illness management, to bathing, dressing, and meal preparation for persons who are homebound. These services are necessary for their clients and patients under the best of conditions; during natural disasters, their services can become critical to a patient's survival.

Ivey's commitment to its clients and patients is evident in its communications plan. Patients and family members have 24 hour-a-day, 7 day-per-week access to skilled dispatchers online and by telephone. After the hurricane, the value of that service was demonstrated over and over again. Patients were in urgent need of oxygen, medication, ostomy supplies, and diabetic resources. Thanks to the highly orchestrated communications plan at Ivey, those products and services so needed by Ivey's patients and clients were quickly dispatched. Every client who had access to a telephone received the services he or she needed.

How did they do it when Ivey, like all the other home health care providers in the area, were without power? By outsourcing. All of Ivey's patient and client communications by a local telephone answering service, which has fully redundant systems, alternate power supplies, and highly trained personnel who calmly communicated with the many frightened, ill, or anxious people who called on Ivey during the crisis.

"This relationship allows us to do what we do best," said Susan Wilson, Chief Technology Officer at Ivey. "We are in the business of helping people with serious health concerns, not in the business of running the kind of robust communications center that was needed during this disaster. We knew that our answering service provider had to be the best. With recent world events and our location here on the coast, we had to be prepared. This was an ideal solution and clearly our patients benefit from the arrangement."

Learn more about telephone answering services and discover how the might be able to help you.