EmergeOrtho Triangle
Your call center keeps pace through an EHR migration, doubles visit capacity, and trains new hires in under a week. Here is how North Carolina’s largest physician-owned orthopedic practice did it with CareDesk.
At a Glance
Organization
EmergeOrtho: formed in 2016 by four North Carolina practices; the largest physician-owned orthopedic practice in the state
Focus of this study
Triangle Region centralized call center operations
Locations
Organization-wide: 65+ outpatient offices across North Carolina (emergeortho.com/about-us). Triangle Region at implementation: 17 locations covering 10 counties, including 13 urgent care clinics (2021 case study)
Providers
Approximately 370 specialists and advanced practice providers organization-wide (emergeortho.com/about-us). Triangle call center at implementation: 60 agents handling 90,000 scheduling calls per year (2021 case study)
EHR / PM
Athenahealth for EHR and practice management (migrated from NextGen); CareDesk as the primary call center workspace
Platform
CareDesk, the Healthcare CRM for patient access operations
The Challenge
EmergeOrtho had outgrown its legacy EHR and was preparing to migrate from NextGen to Athenahealth. On paper, a system upgrade. In practice, real operational risk: EHR migrations typically slow call center performance for months, at the exact moment stability matters most.
The call center was already carrying weight. Agents moved between multiple tools, manually searched for patient context, and duplicated data entry inside the EMR. Physicians wanted appointments distributed evenly, but under pressure, agents tended to book the first doctor they saw. Missed patient information meant patients were called back repeatedly, inflating call volume and dragging satisfaction down.
The Solution
CareDesk was deployed as the primary call center workspace with deep API-driven integration to Athenahealth. Agents live in CareDesk while Athenahealth runs as the system of record. Patient balances, alert notes, visit history, and prior cases surface directly inside CareDesk, so agents handle cases end to end without switching systems or re-entering data. The deployment included:
- Round Robin for equitable appointment distribution across providers
- Intelligent Scheduling with provider requirements and scheduling rules enforced automatically
- Patient Self-Scheduling for appointments, surgeries, and pain management
- Non-clinical workflow guidance, so agents make correct decisions without escalating
- Automatic encounter documentation and Business Intelligence dashboards
The Results
Visit growth
Doubled visits with no increase in service staff (2020-2022); most locations added 10+ visits per week, and the Burlington location added 7-10 visits per day
Onboarding time
3 weeks before CareDesk; under 1 week after (roughly 70% reduction). Confirmed across four documents.
Call capacity
Doubled call volume from 11,000 to 25,000 calls without adding phone staff. Confirmed in the governing ROI three-pillars document (2026-07-10).
First contact resolution
Your patients get issues resolved on first contact (first contact resolution, FCR). Improved FCR cut patient callbacks 34% within 2 months of go-live; longer initial calls were more than offset by fewer total calls per patient. Confirmed across the 2021 case study, governing ROI document, training brief, and live orthopedics page.
Scheduling accuracy
99% scheduling accuracy; provider complaints about scheduling dropped to zero (governing ROI document; 2021 case study reports zero provider complaints about self-scheduling)
Non-clinical guidance
95%+ of calls carry guidance for non-clinical agents to decide independently
Encounter documentation
100% of encounters documented and reportable
Migration resilience
Scaled operations through COVID and the NextGen-to-Athenahealth transition without adding headcount
“CareDesk is key to our growth. Outbound calls and total calls per patient are now less. We found that first contact resolution increased initial call length, but that was more than offset by reduced total calls per patient. We saw the greatest gains among the slower staff members whose numbers weren’t cutting it before but who’ve become very efficient with CareDesk.”
Karen May, COO of Triangle Region, EmergeOrtho
“Some providers are getting 10 more visits per week with self-scheduling, and Burlington urgent care is getting 7-10 more appointments per DAY.”
Angel Jordan, Clinical Manager, EmergeOrtho
See CareDesk on Your Workflows
Considering Athenahealth, or mid-migration? Talk to a team that has already made this transition and kept the call center running. Watch a 2-minute demo or write to sales@keonahealth.com.
