El Rio Community Health Center Creates
Powerful Patient Communications System
Adapt implements Customer Interaction Center™ from
Interactive Intelligence to effectively manage patient needs
Problem
The 900 - and growing - staff members of El Rio Community Health Center (ERCHC) have provided accessible, affordable healthcare to patients in Tucson, Arizona, and the surrounding region since 1970. Every year, nearly 88,000 residents rely on ERCHC for essential medical and dental care. More than 300,000 patient visits occur each year at healthcare provider locations.
ERCHC faced a challenge: providing prompt, accurate, efficient services while continuing to offer same day appointments for nearly 1,700 people daily. Issues included:
- Patients wanted to speak with someone to make appointments without long waits
- Senior ERCHC leaders began sensing real and potential issues with technology and personnel costs: Regardless of their actual roles, employees on busy mornings were pulled off their normal duties to log on and help handle patient calls waiting in queue.
Taking action, ERCHC leaders put together an interdisciplinary team to look into current realities and create a vision for patient communication.
The team charged Evan Hatchell, Voice Services Manager, with conducting an exhaustive search to identify a state-of-the-art contact center communications system to help alleviate the turmoil. The system needed to be agent-friendly and:
· Handle basic call routing
· Transfer calls effectively
· Initiate and deliver “warm” transfers to various departments
· Answer general questions from callers using an automated attendant
· Create a capability to support home workers
“Our previous platform was difficult to work with,” Hatchell recalls. “It didn’t fit our operational model and was too cost prohibitive to adapt to our growing business needs, which left us regularly failing to meet our service level goals and thus, we failed to meet patient expectations, which is never acceptable.”
While phone system improvements were needed, he also preferred exercising caution.
“I wanted a contact center communications platform that could easily work with our existing Cisco communications platform, or any platform for that matter. We wanted a platform that was easy to maintain and offered many features and a small footprint.”
Responses to ERCHC’s RFP were wide-ranging, from all-in-one solutions to complex, multi-vendor, best-of-breed solutions.
Hatchell says he “was very cautious when vendors proposed solutions that required multiple third-party integrations to meet our needs. I knew every third-party integration added a link in the chain that represented potential risk and would require increased support and training over the life of the solution.”
Hatchell focused on solutions that would seamlessly integrate into their existing infrastructure and that could be supported by a managed services agreement if needed, demonstrate strong manufacturer support and product reliability, and were scalable.
“As a non-profit community health center, our resources are precious and we needed a solution that would provide the right foundation to enable us to provide better patient access, better outcomes, and would reduce our expenses. We felt it was important to select a partner who not only had the technology to help us get there, but demonstrated they thoroughly understood our needs throughout the evaluation process.”
Solution
Following rigorous evaluation - with an eye on the future including process automation - ERCHC selected its partner, Adapt Telephony Services, LLC, to implement and configure the Interactive Intelligence Customer Interaction Center® (CIC) for appointment scheduling, call routing and additional applications.
Hatchell says that since March 2012, Interactive’s easy-to-use, stable, “all-in-one” IP communications software suite has lowered maintenance costs, reduced long call queues, and improved the overall patient experience. The CIC software suite offers integrated audio and screen recordings, which are helpful in verifying patient conversations and decisions. It handles virtual hold, performs workforce scheduling, and improves the overall performance of patient services representatives.
He believes CIC minimizes the need for additional servers, thus reducing multiple points of system failure.
“We created a model we can sustain and everything with CIC is already built in. We love the scheduling, forecasting and real-time adherence capabilities of CIC’s workforce management application, Interaction Optimizer®.We also love the tightly integrated audio and screen recording, coupled with multichannel quality assessment functionality that’s provided by CIC’s Interaction Recorder® application.”
Adapt also provides its managed services offering to ERCHC, which satisfies maintenance needs and support requests at a fixed monthly rate.
“Adapt’s managed services plays a large role for us. It gives us peace of mind knowing our critical platform is being monitored 24x7x365, and allows us to focus our resources where they are strategically needed. Adapt even ensures Windows® updates and patches are current, which contributes to a stable platform,” Hatchell says.
Within the contact center, representatives coordinate with clinics to effectively schedule over 1,000 appointments daily.
John Hughes, Patient Communications Manager, likes to stress the importance of the patient-agent call recording function.
“We began by using the audio recording feature only. Now we’ve added integrated screen recording. We now know what went right or wrong during an interaction. Interaction Recorder has become a tremendous risk management tool – and a great training tool for the staff if used in the proper manner.”
Supervisors and representatives see the recorded screen together, then listen and hear what was said as a screen became populated. The agent can see the interaction and hear themselves, and sense what they might have missed saying to a patient.
“The beauty is that combining audio with the screen recording shows the full on-screen encounter and leads to more effective coaching and training,” Hughes notes.
Results
“Adapt’s implementation team and Project Manager, John Rover in particular, saw the world in a similar light to El Rio,” adds Hatchell. “This really helped us streamline the programming, keeping things simple so at a later date we could do more with the software as needed. I was drawn to a group that believed in not over-complicating things,” he says. “John’s experience and attention to detail made our project a success.”
He believes CIC’s simple configuration makes it more readily accessible, something which isn’t always true with a best-of-breed solution that might require an automatic call distribution product, (ACD) alongside a separate IVR and a separate workforce management or recording product.
“I expected a rockier road with a lot of issues, but things were surprisingly smooth. With limited staff, I cannot afford to get bogged down with issues. Adapt’s experienced team made this my smoothest rollout to date.”
ERCHC’s recently hired contact center quality and workforce management analyst will implement some of the designs already in place, work closely with Hughes in optimizing schedules, and deploy analytical tools.
Interaction Optimizer is receiving a lot of attention with its ability to handle multichannel forecasting and scheduling, skills-based forecasting and scheduling, intraday management and reforecasting, agent self-service, and other functions.
Chief Operating Officer Nancy Johnson, RN, PhD, adds, “we had initially looked at outsourcing but decided it wasn’t for us based on the variety and complexity of the work we do. Then we looked to Evan to guide the technical considerations based on the magic CIC can do. We feel we’ve only scratched the surface.”
Future
Hatchell is presently underway implementing Interactive’s Interaction Process Automation® (IPA) application to create a robust, consistent and measurable patient appointment notification system.
IPA is an intuitive, communications-based process automation tool that helps define what tasks are to be tracked, designs work item forms, and lays out process flows and specific business logic.
Numerous tools will enable IPA to exchange information throughout the organization. A process orchestration engine will manage the launch of patient appointment reminders, push work along a designed path, and execute logic specified for each step.
Hatchell says he has plans to extend the robust capabilities of IPA to other departments and further leverage their investment in this strategic tool.
“By deploying IPA, we are able to tightly integrate our communications platform with business process automation,” he concludes. “I’m very excited about this technology in particular as it has the potential to impact many areas of our business.”
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