Progressive Psychiatric Clinic Uses Spruce to Manage Diverse Patient Needs and Care Team Collaboration

Meet the team (including team mascot, Garbanzo) at Goodwin Health Café, a private practice in Spokane, Washington, run by nurse practitioners who treat mental health conditions and disorders. Goodwin Health Café employs both psychiatric and primary care nurse practitioners to address both the medical and psychiatric conditions that can lead to mental illness.

Jael Allen, a formidable force in the office, shared some insights into how the team uses Spruce. Read on!

What kind of work do you do?
We’re a small psychiatric office and ketamine clinic. We have weekly recurring appointments with patients that last 1-2 hours on top of our schedule of regular appointments, so there are a lot of patients coming in for different things and unique treatments. It keeps us busy!

How long have you been doing it?
The practice has been open for four years and boasts a growing team of providers.

What first brought you to Spruce?
We tried two different communication solutions before Spruce and we would miss calls, voicemails got lost, we couldn’t save contacts, and more. As soon as we demo’d Spruce we knew it was a game changer. Spruce delivers a history of all of our calls, texts, faxes, internal messaging, and more. With multiple different nurses, providers, and receptionists, it was exactly what we needed to keep everything straight. Nothing slips through the cracks.

How do you use Spruce at work?
We use Spruce primarily for patient communication, although the internal messaging and paging components are critical for us. Prescription refills is also a big one for our practice and Spruce takes the guesswork out of the equation.

We leverage Spruce for coordinating appointments with patients (and rescheduling appointments, too). And, when it comes to filling scripts, patients text in what they need and we fill it. It’s been automated via the phone tree to make the process even simpler.

Teammate collaboration with internal messaging and paging is beyond helpful because we can page the right team member for the specific need(s) of the patients, which are often diverse. Our team actually uses it as a to-do list! Talking with teammates, updating teams with patient status and medication needs, and alerting patients and providers when scripts will be filled, are all just some of the reasons we rely heavily on this solution.

The whole team has a bird’s eye view of what’s going on in the practice. I would be remiss not to mention the notes feature, which is super cool too because for insurance billing we can notate appeals and denials and provide more color around the situation, then assign a teammate for follow up.

We’ll get at least 40 patients texting/calling us each and every day and 15+ incoming faxes—it would be a lot to manage without Spruce!

What is your favorite Spruce feature?
Internal messaging! We are obsessed with it. We like team to team messaging as well. The way you can schedule messages is also really helpful. With that feature, we don’t have to answer patients in the middle of the night but instead schedule a response during regular business hours. The paging feature is everything, too! And our entire team was able to learn Spruce quickly—even those less tech savvy.

What do you like to do most when you’re not working?!
I love to paint and I have a Golden Doodle named Garbanzo! Spruce actually makes it easier for me to spend time with Garbanzo because I’m able to put work out of my mind.

Learn even more about Goodwin Health Cafe.

New to Spruce? Try it out FREE for 14 days: https://l.sprucehealth.com/startspruce