What a call disposition is

It is a dropdown at the end of every contact: booked, no answer, wrong number, patient declines, already had it done, call back later. Six clicks a day per agent end up being the only source of truth about what happened to thousands of patients.

What happens if the agent does not disposition the contact?

The interaction stays open. The case does not return to the queue, does not enter the report and shows up as pending to nobody, so it looks exactly like an unmanaged referral. The difference is that here somebody did speak to the patient, and that work was lost whole. The VA's consult closure rules put a clock on the same risk: a consult's Pending status has to be updated no later than 48 hours after the request is received, and adding a comment without changing the status does not count.

The second problem is the quality of the code chosen. Logging no answer when the phone number was wrong hides a data problem that could be fixed once and stay fixed. Logging declined when the patient only asked to be called later kills a case that was still alive.

• A close-out code with a reason, kept separate from an explicit patient refusal.
• An invalid-contact-details code that triggers correction instead of a pointless second attempt.
• A code for the patient already seen elsewhere, which is the only way leakage becomes visible.

When the code table is good, the report stops being an opinion. It is the same discipline we hold our own numbers to in how we measure.