Free Resource
The Post-Op Call Escalation Criteria Template
The discharge-instruction phone number your ASC gives every patient is going to ring. A template for what the person answering it needs to tell an emergency from a normal recovery.
Medicare's Conditions for Coverage require an ASC to send every patient home with written discharge instructions and physician contact information for follow-up care — the discharge order and the post-operative instructions aren't optional paperwork, they're a condition of the center's Medicare participation.
That contact information is a phone number, and patients call it. Whoever answers has to sort a normal recovery complaint from a genuine post-op emergency, at 9pm, without a clinician on the line — and do it consistently across every procedure type the center performs.
This is a template for the escalation criteria you hand that line. Your surgeons and anesthesia team set the actual thresholds per procedure; the structure here makes sure nothing is left to the agent's judgment.
1. The regulation behind the phone number
Under the ASC discharge condition for coverage, the center must ensure patients are informed of their prescriptions, post-operative instructions, and physician contact information for follow-up care, and must document a post-surgical assessment before discharge. The phone number on that paperwork is the one your answering line staffs.
A generic 'call your doctor with any concerns' line doesn't satisfy the spirit of that requirement if the person answering can't tell a routine question from a complication. The regulation gets you the contact information; your protocol is what makes the contact information useful at 9pm.
2. A branch per symptom category, not per procedure
You don't need a separate script for every procedure your ASC performs. Build branches by symptom category, then note which procedures make a given branch more or less likely to be serious: bleeding at the surgical site; pain not controlled by the prescribed regimen; fever; nausea or vomiting that won't stop; signs of infection at the incision (redness, warmth, discharge); and anesthesia after-effects (breathing difficulty, prolonged confusion, or drowsiness well past the expected window).
For a sense of how specific a real symptom list needs to be, MedlinePlus's own post-cardiac-catheterization discharge instructions name exact thresholds: bleeding at the site that doesn't stop with pressure, discoloration or numbness of the limb, a pulse under 60 or over 100-120, and a temperature over 101°F. Your surgeons should set comparably specific thresholds for the procedures your center actually performs, rather than leaving 'a lot of pain' or 'some bleeding' for the agent to interpret.
Each branch is two or three questions, in order, with the tier attached to each answer. A branch that needs more questions than that to decide should route straight to the on-call surgeon — that's a clinical read, not a script.
3. Three tiers, defined by what the agent does
Tier 1 — call 911 / go to the ED now: for the combinations your surgeons flag as always-escalate (uncontrolled bleeding, breathing difficulty, chest pain, loss of consciousness). Tier 2 — on-call surgeon or CRNA contacted now: the agent runs your escalation ladder and connects or arranges a callback within a stated window. Tier 3 — reassurance plus next-business-day follow-up: for the branch's pre-approved routine guidance, logged for the morning.
The agent is matching answers to the tier your protocol assigns, not assessing the complication themselves.
Keep reading — no download required
The rest of this — the remaining sections, the full checklist, and the sources — opens right here on the page. One email, no PDF, no mailing list.
Rather have someone run the phones instead of writing the protocol? That's what we do.
Ambulatory Surgery Centers answering · Talk to our team
This resource references dated regulatory material. Last reviewed against its sources for the 2027-04-30 revision cycle.