The Arizona Medical Board issued nearly 2,000 initial MD licenses in fiscal year 2020, bringing the total number of licensed MDs to roughly 26,000. In processing all of those applications and subsequent renewals, the state emailed a staggering number of notifications and other correspondences. How do Arizona’s licensing specialists keep up with so much work?
Automation helps.
The state medical board uses a combination of templated correspondences and automatic notifications to share important information with new and renewing physicians. Consider the following examples.
Physicians in Arizona must renew their licenses by their birthdays every two years. Among the automated notifications the GL Suite application sends is a birthday reminder for renewing physicians.
“An email goes out that says, ‘Hey, today’s your birthday, and you were supposed to renew,’” says Pushpa Gregory, application development manager with the medical board. The email also tells physicians they’ll be assessed a late fee if they don’t renew within a month.
The medical board uses another email notification when a physician completes the initial application process. When the application is approved, staff click a check box that triggers an email telling the physician that no requirements are outstanding and that a payment is due. Their licensing system automatically places the physician’s name and application number into the email. It also includes the payment amount, which varies from physician to physician. Because physicians renew on their birthdays, they initially pay a prorated fee.
The email could be triggered automatically by a change in application status. However, says Gregory, Arizona’s medical board has chosen to make the process somewhat manual because staff prefer to double-check the supporting documentation.
Automatic notifications and custom email templates like those Arizona uses are components of integrated communication management functionality. Their licensing system can send notifications one at a time or in batches, and these can be triggered automatically or, if your agency chooses, by clicking a check box.
Additional components of integrated communication management include the storage of emails to related records within the system; the management of phone calls; the ability to scan incoming forms and auto-populate values on assigned fields in the licensing system; and the construction of online portals that allow easy, electronic communication between agency staff and licensees.
Learn more about email templates, automatic notifications and our licensing system, GL Suite.
