Design Problem:
Doctors wishing to leave confidential messages are wasting time chasing down patients as they cannot leave sensitive infomation on home answering machines.

Design Solution:
An interactive voice response system was designed with two separate interfaces for leaving and retreiving messages. For the physicians, the need for efficiency and managing interruptions were addressed by allowing barge-in, and to reduce errors, a text-to-speech function was added to repeat a patient's name to reinforce the patient ID number. For the patients, verbal prompts were carefully selected to be clear and unambiguous yet concise.

Result:
The final product reduces the load on the healthcare staff as they no longer “chase down” patients who are not at home when they call. The physicians have a secure place to leave messages and patients can set aside private time to retrieve sensitive information. The system has been used successfully by patients with no training.