Modernize Healthcare Contact Centers for Staff and Patients

Reducing Healthcare Staff Burnout

For Springfield Clinic, a 680-provider medical group in central Illinois, consolidating onto Cisco’s Webex Contact Center improved the experience for call agents and for IT professionals.

“Before, we had all these different systems,” CIO Nick Fuchs says. “The way Springfield Clinic has grown, historically, is that new practices become a part of our network. We were limited on what we could do to extend our existing platform. It required a bunch of additional investment in legacy technology. In most cases, if it was a large-enough practice, we had to take on their existing system and join it to our system in unorthodox ways. That meant our patient access staff couldn’t cover for those locations without being onsite. It was a nightmare.”

Before the move to Webex, high-volume call days would lead to lengthy queues. Now, when a queue grows longer than a couple of minutes, Webex automatically transfers calls to agents in another office, allowing them to cover for each other, even from different locations.

READ MORE: AI in customer experience enhances the patient journey.

“That, in and of itself, has improved the employee experience,” Fuchs says. “Before, people were exhausted and burnt out. The patient experience has also improved from waiting on hold to talking to someone who can help them. That was big.”

The move to Webex yielded tangible business benefits almost immediately. Springfield Clinic’s call abandonment rate dropped by 44%, and average wait time decreased by 71%.

The organization has also benefited from Cisco’s centralized reporting, and the phone system isn’t a “major burden” any longer, Fuchs adds.

“That has been a huge improvement, not having to try to piece together reporting across six or seven different systems,” he says. “Now, we have centralized reporting to show the performance at the agent level, and then how departments are performing, where we’re seeing upticks, where we’re seeing a performance decline and using that to help manage staff.”

At Johns Hopkins, Zhao says the Avaya system’s callback feature is reducing the number of abandoned calls. Patients on hold are offered the option of a callback about 90 seconds into their call, she says, because that is when abandonment rates tend to spike.

“It’s better from a patient experience standpoint, and it minimizes long wait times, which can help with referral retention and patient retention,” Zhao says. “That’s really important. If you don’t pick up that call, patients are going to go somewhere else, and so we want to capture that. It really helped us with retention, and it also creates a better patient experience.”

Johns Hopkins Medicine reduced its call volume by 3% and its operating costs by $1.4 million using a contact center solution from Avaya, giving staff more time to assist patients with complex needs.

Adding Value to the Patient Experience

U.S. healthcare providers have increasingly prioritized the patient experience in recent years, according to Philip Bradley, digital health strategist at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society.

“We probably should have focused more on the patient experience all along,” he says. “Organizations have had initiatives move in this direction, but the technology hasn’t always supported it. In the past, the electronic health records focus was more about automating the medical record, capturing nurse and physician documentation and handling billing, and we did that fairly well. Now, the shift is toward meeting the expectations of patients and their families, not just while in front of a clinician but also at home.”

Contact center technology, Bradley adds, is just one of the tools healthcare providers need to improve the patient experience. Ambient listening technology, he says, lets physicians keep their focus on patients during visits, instead of on typing up notes. It all adds up to helping patients feel more valued and making providers’ jobs better.

“It’s a cultural shift,” Bradley says. “We aren’t seeing it as a productivity gain. That technology isn’t letting a doctor see one additional patient, but it does get them home at the end of the day because their notes are finished. They review them, they sign off, and they’re done. It’s a tremendous opportunity.”

As more patients receive care or recover at home, health systems need to ensure that these patients can get their questions answered quickly and easily.

“Let’s say a patient is in the hospital for congestive heart failure, and they’re sent home with a Bluetooth scale,” he says. “What if they have a question about how to use it? If the patient has a bad experience when they call in, they’re going to post about it on social media and rake you over the coals. We have to be very careful as more devices are going home with these patients about how we answer those calls and provide ongoing patient service.”

DISCOVER: Healthcare organizations need a customer experience that blends AI and the human touch.

What’s Next for Healthcare Contact Centers

Although many industries are using AI to improve customer service, healthcare has been slower to adopt the technology due to data silos, privacy concerns and cost.

“You need to have clean data to be able to do it, so that’s a bit of a holdback,” says Scott Merritt, patient experience architect at CDW. “Also, healthcare organizations are concerned about security and costs. They often want to be a bit behind the bleeding edge.”

Springfield Clinic has begun experimenting with AI-powered call transcription and summary, and Fuchs says he is looking forward to rolling out the capability across the organization.

“That’s going to be a huge win for our team,” he says. “Our people can then focus more on being empathetic and solving problems with the patient instead of note-taking. They get a summary at the end of the call, and they can just put it right into the electronic health record.”

Johns Hopkins Medicine is planning to consolidate its telephony and analytics in the cloud, along with AI features that help the organization analyze calls and improve quality, Zhao says.

“There’s a very limited number of calls that we can actually go through right now, so the scalability isn’t there,” she adds. “Newer solutions are going to flag key phrases and tone of voice to allow supervisors to jump in.”

Zhao is looking forward to optimizing processes so the organization can really understand patient interactions. “What are the challenges? What are some of the insights that we can’t gain currently? That’s going to take us to the next level,” she says.