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Eric Bazan is the Lead Receptionist at Mission Veterinary Hospital in South Texas where he oversees the front desk team of the small and large animal veterinary hospital. Our Customer Success team recently caught up with Eric to hear how they have been using Otto digital forms at their practice to save dozens of hours each week.

Read on or listen to the full interview below:

Otto: How big is the clinic? How many doctors on staff and how many total staff?
Eric Bazan: Currently, we have four veterinarians here, which would be Dr. Brian, Dr. Heflin or Dr. Cavazos. And Dr. Fuentes. As far as staff goes, I believe there’s maybe 27 of us in total, including the veterinarians.

TV: How long has Mission Veterinary been using Otto?
EB: Six months in total here in our location.

TV: What problems were you initially trying to solve with Otto?
EB: The main one was just being able to connect with our clients, our phone lines were mainly congested, for the most part, they kept getting forwarded, a lot of people couldn’t even get through and [Otto] came in and got that problem solved. For the most part, we saw a reduction in the phone calls after the veterinarians are able to discuss with [the clients], instead of them having call back and forth as well or play phone tag to try to get a hold of the veterinarian.

TV: How much were your phone calls reduced?
EB: I don’t have the actual numbers, but coming from personal experience, a lot of the phone calls just stopped coming in after they were able to just speak to the veterinarian directly. It solves a lot of them having to ask them questions, or having to get back with the veterinarian, or having to leave a phone message for the veterinarian themselves. They could just directly answer them through [Otto Flow], eliminating the middleman.

TV: Very good to hear! Why did you choose Otto versus any other alternative?
EB: I know cost-wise was a pretty good indication for it, and [Otto] was also highly recommended by Dr. Fuentes.
Rachael Alexander (Inventory Manager): I started looking into it and started comparing you all with other companies, and I attended several webinars with Otto, and we just preferred you!

TV: What do you enjoy most about Otto so far? How has it been helping your clinic?
EB: It’s been going really good. Coming from the receptionist standpoint, it’s been more seamless than anything. It has been a lot easier for us to get all [patient] information compiled together in a really easy location, especially because it’s really easy for them to be able to receive everything via text message.

TV: That makes a lot of sense, have you felt like it’s saving the team time?
EB: It actually has, most of the time whenever the veterinarian is able to have the conversation with them via Otto – especially for patients that have been dropped off at our clinic – we’re able to get all their information downloaded and then put it into their file, which makes it seamless.

TV: That’s what we strive for. We’re always trying to make sure that we’re on top of things, always trying to make sure that we’re listening to any feedback.
EB: Perfect. Changing the phone numbers is easy, especially if it’s a different family member that drops by our system, adding a phone number is relatively easy as well, I think that got updated a little bit later on where you can have a primary and then add a secondary, so that was awesome. Even if we did send it to the wrong phone number, we can just resend it again by adding in the correct phone number for them.

TV: What are your favorite features and why are they your favorite?
EB: Setting up forms for people to fill out is so helpful, especially with all the questions already preloaded on there and the ability to be able to create your own forms, whether it be multiple choice or if they can write out their own like sections on it. I think that has probably been the best thing that we have been able to use here. Anywhere ranging from surgery authorization forms to wellness checks recheck, and so forth, especially multi-language ones, it’s awesome, to be honest!

TV: Did you do any onboarding or training? And if you did, how did that go?
EB: We did do some training with a couple of us. The training was fast, easy, simple. Once you get your hands on it, it just becomes so much more efficient.

TV: Once you had that training, how many days did it take to start using the product?
EB: The next day we started using it. Any questions I did have were answered promptly by Nicole. She was pretty quick to respond to most of the emails that I sent her that same day.

TV: Do you feel there are certain team members that are finding it most beneficial and why?
EB: I can tell you from personal experience, receptionists up front are loving it just because there are less phone calls for us to have to deal with. Technicians in the back, regarding test results, are using it as well. Any blood work results that came in, blood exams, things like that, we’ll get on Otto and notify the client as opposed to having a call.

TV: Have you been able to quantify how much time that might have saved?
EB: Most of the times when we were just doing everything on paper, it was taking about an hour to two for an actual office visit, and I think we sharpened it down to 30 minutes for an office visit after using Otto because there was no going back and forth having to go outside to talk to the client, come back inside, go outside again. It just eliminated that back and forth.

“It was taking about an hour to two for an actual office visit, and I think we sharpened it down to 30 minutes for an office visit after using Otto”

TV: Anything else you enjoy about Otto that we didn’t cover?
EB: For the most part, it’s just been upgrading the entire time we’ve had it. So that’s mainly the main reason why we’ve kept it onboard this long. Dr. Brian, who is the practice owner, has actually enjoyed it as well because she’s able to compile all her notes and get everything downloaded straight into the file and she can read back on them later as well. Being able to convert them into a PDF format and download them or having the choice to be downloaded directly to Cornerstone saves us a lot of time.

I’ve noticed the updates happening pretty frequently, almost every single month or so. Whenever I log back on, there’s like a new updated feature. [Sometimes we would think] “I really wish you did this or that,” and then it’ll show up there next month. For the most part, I really have not had any difficulty. Ever since the beginning, I think there was one outage with you guys, but we got the alert immediately, and that you guys had already responded to it and knew about it, and had already resolved it.