Alphabet Soup: Terminology and Voicemail Etiquette

Transcript

SPEAKER_1: Alright, so last time we established that the schedule isn't just a calendar — it's a system built around three booths. That framing really matters. Now I want to get into the shorthand, because the department runs on abbreviations and someone new is going to see them everywhere. SPEAKER_2: Right, and if nobody explains them, they just look like random letters. So the key idea is that a lot of this shorthand comes from two places — Latin medical terminology and practical voicemail notation. Once our listener knows where the terms come from, they actually stick. SPEAKER_1: Let's start with the Latin ones because those trip people up the most. AD and AS. SPEAKER_2: So AD means right ear — or right hearing aid. It comes from the Latin auris dextra. Auris means ear, dextra means right. And AS means left ear or left hearing aid, from auris sinistra. Sinistra meaning left. SPEAKER_1: And there's a memory trick for AS, right? Because left and right are easy to mix up under pressure. SPEAKER_2: [emphasis] S for southpaw. A southpaw is a left-handed person, so AS — left. That one tends to land. And then ADHA and ASHA are just extensions — ADHA for right hearing aid specifically, ASHA for left hearing aid. SPEAKER_1: So if someone writes ADHA on a file, that's the right hearing aid. Not the left. SPEAKER_2: Exactly. And think of how often someone might say 'the right aid needs adjustment' — if that gets written down casually without the abbreviation, it's easy for someone else to read it wrong. The standardized shorthand removes that ambiguity. SPEAKER_1: Mm-hmm. What about HT? SPEAKER_2: HT is Hearing Test. Simple one, but important because it shows up constantly in the schedule. And remember from last time — that's a seventy-five minute appointment that requires a booth. SPEAKER_1: Now, voicemail notation. This is something I don't think people expect to be formalized, but it really is. SPEAKER_2: It has to be. Suppose a member calls three times over two days and three different people handle those messages. If everyone writes notes differently, the next person picking up that file has no idea what actually happened. So the department uses three standard abbreviations. SW means Spoke With. SWA means Spoke With Already — meaning the member has already been reached and the matter is handled. And LM means Left Message, so contact was attempted but the member wasn't reached directly. SPEAKER_1: How should someone read SW versus SWA? They sound similar. SPEAKER_2: Good question. SW just means you had a conversation with the member. SWA is more of a flag — it tells the next person 'don't call again, this is already resolved.' It prevents someone from making a redundant call because they didn't realize the member was already contacted. SPEAKER_1: So SWA is almost a stop signal. SPEAKER_2: Exactly. And then there's the dating and ordering rule, which matters just as much. Each voicemail message gets marked with the date it was received or handled. And messages are written newest to oldest — so whoever picks up the log sees the most recent contact attempt right at the top. SPEAKER_1: That ordering feels counterintuitive at first. Most people would write things chronologically, oldest first. SPEAKER_2: [chuckle] Right, and that's the instinct to override. The reason newest-to-oldest works is efficiency. If a member called yesterday and again this morning, the person handling the file needs to know what happened most recently — not work backward through a timeline. The most current information should be immediately visible. SPEAKER_1: For example, if the log shows an earlier LM entry and then a later SW entry, the later SW entry goes above the earlier LM entry. SPEAKER_2: Exactly that. And both entries have dates, so the record is clear. Now, the takeaway for anyone building these habits early — the notation isn't bureaucracy for its own sake. It's how a team of people shares a patient record without having to track each other down to ask what happened. SPEAKER_1: That's a good way to frame it. The shorthand is team communication compressed into a few letters. SPEAKER_2: And it connects back to the booth system, actually. The same logic applies — the schedule is a shared resource, the voicemail log is a shared resource. Both need consistent notation so anyone can pick them up and understand the current state immediately. From there, we'll map out appointment types by duration and booth requirement, so our listener can start building that scheduling instinct from the ground up.