Digital Workspace

Equip Healthcare Contact Center Agents with the Best Tools

Hospital contact centers need to modernize to meet the demands of changing patient expectations.

Shalini Kathuria Narang is a software development professional with over two decades of experience with various software and healthcare companies.

One of the first ways a patient can interact with a healthcare organization is through its contact center. It’s crucial to make a good impression: If a patient gets transferred to the wrong department, is unable to schedule an appointment or has to answer redundant questions, that decreases their satisfaction with the experience, and they’re likely to look for care elsewhere.

With the growth of agentic artificial intelligence, hospital contact centers should no longer be an area of confusing transfers, long wait times and busy lines. When healthcare organizations get their contact center strategy right, they can satisfy patient expectations and streamline workflows for their human agents.

When considering the tools for a contact center agent, here are four key considerations to ensure they connect people to the care they need.

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1. Integrate Platforms Within the Organization’s Environment

A contact center agent may need to access the electronic health records system while helping a patient with a query about a follow-up or checking to see if they need to schedule vaccinations or refill prescriptions. In such cases, the contact center platform needs to be well connected within the organization’s ecosystem. For example, when Florida-based Jupiter Medical Center moved to Epic, it had to re-evaluate its pre-access processes because it was using a patchwork of applications for scheduling, registration and authorization. Moving to a unified platform helped provide a better experience for both patients and contact center agents.

2. Prioritize Security and Compliance

Although organizations may want to provide a user-friendly experience that patients are familiar with — for example, as consumers of retail or food delivery services — healthcare is a highly regulated industry that requires stringent safeguards for protected health information. Thankfully, many platforms are tailored to meet these needs. And because contact center agents are likely to work remotely, organizations need to ensure a zero-trust approach with strong identity and access management.

3. Understand Asynchronous Versus Real-Time Communication

Many healthcare organizations have turned to cloud-based contact center platforms, allowing them to scale quickly and offer a more intuitive user experience. For patient questions that require prompt responses, synchronous communication (such as video or phone calls) is encouraged. For concerns that do not need immediate responses, agents can use asynchronous communication (such as texting or email). Many organizations have deployed AI chatbots for asynchronous tasks that may not need human intervention, such as prescription refills and appointment scheduling.

4. Have Clear Measures of Success for Adoption

Key performance indicators for contact centers commonly include first-call resolution, average hold time, abandonment rate, average call time and forecasting accuracy. “We also look at no-show rates, or when no follow-up appointment was scheduled,” Ryan Cameron, vice president of technology and innovation at Children’s Nebraska, told HealthTech. “These KPIs tell us that something about the automation process wasn’t perfect for the patient. We want to know that so we can close those gaps.”

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