RingRx Creates Holistic Solutions for a Holistic Practice

Dr. John Stracks, after leaving his hospital-affiliated role, aimed to establish a medical office dedicated to holistic medicine. Because of Dr. Stracks’s personal journey through his own healing, he believed it was very important to bring a patient-centered approach to dealing with long-term conditions like chronic pain. In establishing Cormendi Health, Dr. Stracks wanted to look at the patient story from all sides and to be able to spend the kind of time with patients that doctors in hospitals or large practices often can’t.

Cormendi Health caters to individuals often let down by the traditional medical system. Dr. Stracks believes in treating the whole person, using integrative strategies, and employing a mind-body approach, treating clients who haven’t found relief in traditional methods. He believes emotional and mental states significantly influence physical conditions. This holistic worldview is key to how Cormendi operates and helps its patients.

“RingRx not only gave us a better process for routing calls, but we were also able to differentiate the new incoming patient calls from established patients, which makes it much easier to know who’s responsible for what…”

Simplified Patient Care, Complex Admin Challenges

Though the holistic care approach greatly benefited patients, applying the same philosophy to office management proved challenging.

“My husband envisioned a therapy practice where he’d handle all operations,” shared Lisa Stracks, Executive Director. “And we very quickly realized that wasn’t going to work out very well, because when he was seeing patients, he wasn’t answering the phone. So I jumped in, thinking, ‘sure, I can answer the phone while you’re seeing patients.’ ”

This approach also proved to be short-lived. “After just a few months, it was too busy for me too,” continued Lisa. “So we brought in one of his former medical assistants and a few months after that, we brought in yet another medical assistant. As the office continued to grow, we ended up with six or seven different practitioners working with us part time, as well as Dr. Stracks. And then it very quickly became apparent that we needed better systems.”

Initially, Cormendi routed all communications – calls and faxes – through a Google number to their residence. However, the growing volume and expanding team made this method untenable. So they began researching for more flexible and distributable solutions, and RingRx quickly came to the fore.

Unifying Care, People, and Locations

Cormendi Health boasts a regional team of specialists, each offering unique expertise in patient care. Because of that, one of the core aspects of RingRx that really appealed to Cormendi was its ability to create seamless teams from anywhere in the world.

“Another thing to know about our practice is that almost everybody works remotely at least part of the time, especially post-pandemic,” explains Lisa. “For example, we have one admin person working from Canada, another person in Oregon, we’re up to 12 people now. Even those of us in the Chicago area are working from home more often than not.”

The diverse locations of staff presented organizational challenges, necessitating the search for effective solutions. “Definitely logistics was the biggest part of it when we were using Google Voice. I never knew if Caroline, who works in a different location, was going to answer it, and she never knew if I was going to answer it,” adds Lisa.

“Now I can watch in real time; if I see that somebody isn’t picking up, I can always jump in and do it. So RingRx helped us logistically from a technology standpoint, and also in terms of our office systems and processes.”

Expanding Capabilities with New RingRx Features

After enhancing call handling and integration, Cormendi Health explored other avenues for improvement. This second stage included both increased phone tree usage and building in text messaging to patients. 

“RingRx not only gave us a better process for routing calls, but we were also able to differentiate the new incoming patient calls from established patients, which makes it much easier to know who’s responsible for what,” states Lisa. “The phone tree is definitely one of our success stories, especially setting up tailored messages on different extensions. That’s helped us a great deal.”

Integration and setup went quickly for the newer features. “When we first called and talked to RingRx about setting up the system, they asked us what we needed, and then they built it out for us and put it into practice. And then after a while, we contacted them and said we actually need to have a phone tree now because we’re busy enough that we need a separate line for new patients and for regular patients, can you do that for us? And within a couple of days, it was up and running. It was great, especially as it’s customized for us. RingRx just makes my life a whole lot easier.”

Dr. Stracks’s office also started to make more use of RingRx’s text messaging capabilities, especially for appointments. “The other thing we use that has worked out great is the texting. If we’re having trouble reaching a client, we can text them. And that has been really helpful, being able to ping them and say, ‘Hey, your appointment started five minutes ago, please call us.’” Lisa explains: “I used to have to chase them with calls, spend a lot more time with voicemails and phones ringing, leave messages like ‘please give us a call at your earliest convenience about something urgent.’ And of course, we don’t send HIPAA-related information, but it’s just a super easy way for us to reach out and connect with people and make sure that things happen. So I would say that’s another success story.” 

Building for the Future

Cormendi Health has integrated tech advancements like Electronic Medical Records, which merge Zoom calls and faxes into patient charts, and introduced an online membership platform offering added insights and tips. Lisa explains that one of Dr. Stracks’s core tenets is to be extremely responsive to patient needs and requests: “RingRx allows us to do that in many ways, and we’re still looking at other ways we can further build out services – they’ve been unbelievably helpful for us. We appreciate speed they’ve allowed us to have.”

As Cormendi Health looks to the future, their commitment to a holistic view of both practice and patients is evident – a promising benefit for all involved. We’re proud to be even a small part of their success and look forward to seeing their practice further evolve and continue to positively affect people’s lives.