Monday June 24, 2013

On May 4th, more than 300 men in Ottawa received a free PSA test courtesy of the Ride For Dad and The Ottawa Hospital Foundation.  Vocantas was proud to be a sponsor of the event, providing every man that received a test that day with an interactive follow up phone call to provide test result information.

Garry Janz, Co-founder and President of Ride For Dad, said “I was not a believer in the beginning. I didn’t think that reaching out to our clinic attendees with an automated call would be well received. What I realized when I received the call myself was the efficiency and value in having an automated system. Instead of waiting weeks for results, our clinic attendees now had follow-up within 48 hours of their PSA test and we could connect with every man that attended and interact to collect some valuable data.”

Ride For Dad, The Ottawa Hospital Foundation and Vocantas are proud to partner and work together to provide this important PSA clinic for men in our community. The Vocantas solution has been and will be providing the interactive follow up calls to PSA clinic attendees. The Vocantas product, CallAssure™, calls patients in a real human voice from an automated telephone system. Using information in the database the system dynamically pulls the patient’s individual information and provides an interactive experience to ensure the patient fully understands the information given. Ride For Dad can then see statistics about calls made and interactions that took place. Patient feedback is provided in aggregate form to help organizations collect valuable patient input.

The system is not only 100% reliable, but is consistent in tone, voice and message. Whereas a human making repeated calls will experience fatigue and may interpret results incorrectly or provide incorrect data to the patient, the automated system never makes a mistake. Patients receive phone calls in the evening when they are more likely to be home, and the system detects and redirects when voicemail or answering machines are detected.

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer affecting Canadian men. A Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test is one of the simplest and quickest ways to help detect prostate cancer in men.  With early detection, 90 per cent of cases can be treated. The few minutes spent getting the test might end up saving your life!