Healthcare Contact Centers: Modernizing Your Solution
How to Modernize Your Healthcare Contact Center
Healthcare communications technology is rapidly evolving, introducing powerful new capabilities that promise to improve patient satisfaction, streamline operations, and cut costs. These forces place significant pressure on healthcare organizations to modernize their contact center solutions to meet patient expectations and keep pace with competitors.
Without a strategic approach, however, modernization often creates new issues for overburdened providers who struggle to know where to begin. This guide lists the latest trends and common obstacles in healthcare contact center modernization, plus offers a strategic approach to ensuring your next contact center solves problems instead of creating them.
Contemporary Challenges & Modernization Trends
Modernization is when contact centers leverage technology to solve contemporary challenges. Today’s contact centers help healthcare organizations address the following issues.
Contemporary Challenges
Poor Patient Satisfaction
Outstanding communication is key to an exceptional patient experience, yet many healthcare organizations fail to meet patient expectations. Modern patients want to communicate via their preferred platforms – whether that’s phone, email, text, or even social media – and archaic systems with limited capabilities can leave patients feeling dissatisfied.
Consider these insights from Mitel:
60% of patients report missing healthcare calls, and 50% find it difficult to return calls
Poor “staff-to-patient” communications is frequently cited as a source of frustration
Inadequate patient follow-up is costly: the average 30-day readmittance costs hospitals $15,200
Provider and Staff Frustration
Inefficient workflows, unnecessary interruptions, and slow communications leave providers and staff feeling frustrated. Mitel reports that care teams lose an average of 19 minutes per hour due to communications bottlenecks, and critical care nurses are interrupted 2-23 times per hour due to lack of communications control.
Compliance and Security
The HIPAA Journal reports that 5,887 healthcare data breaches of 500 or more records occurred between 2009 and 2023, exposing more than 500 million healthcare records. Data breaches and the ever-present threat of ransomware make compliance and security critical considerations as healthcare organizations modernize their communications systems.
Competition
Healthcare contact centers must deliver exceptional patient, provider, and staff experiences. If they don’t, organizations risk losing patients and top employees to competitors who invest in the tools needed to provide an exceptional experience.
Limited capabilities, aging infrastructures, and rising costs compound the challenges healthcare organizations face – but that shouldn’t dissuade them from modernizing their communications. The reality is that many healthcare organizations must overhaul their contact centers to remain competitive, but they must also do it strategically to avoid common pitfalls.
5 Modernization Trends
Modern healthcare contact center solutions are designed to improve experiences, create efficiencies, and cut costs. Here are five key modernization trends.
1. UCaaS
The patient experience is paramount, but so are provider and staff experiences. However, many healthcare organizations run on legacy systems with dated technology that delivers poor experiences.
Patients want to communicate via their preferred channels, and they want virtual visits
Providers are still using pagers and don’t have the tools they need to communicate on the fly or video conference with specialists form a patient’s room
Older technology doesn’t support the modern need for remote staff
Unified communications solves those problems with:
Omnichannel capabilities that enable patients, providers, and staff to reach patients via any platform
Collaboration tools that improve efficiency, prevent miscommunication, and enable patients to take an active role in their care
Seamless remote and video conferencing capabilities that create efficiencies in a geographically diverse workforce and enable virtual visits that allow patients to receive care from home
2. Self Help, Automation, and AI Assistance
Patients want self-help options and healthcare organizations want efficiency. Both want data now. Self-help, automation, and AI tools empower patients and staff by giving them the information they need, when they need it. They also create efficiencies and foster patient and employee retention.
Automated reminders: A CVS study found that most patients want reminders for appointments, checkups, routine testing, and prescription refills
Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Guided prompts and natural language processing help patients get quicker, more accurate services and reduce the number of routine calls each staff member must handle, freeing agents to work on more complex cases
Intelligent call routing: Automatically directs calls to a certain person or group based on predefined criteria, such as current volume, time of day, staff availability, and user input
Knowledge base: Provides patients with answers to commonly asked questions, helping them get the details they need quickly without staff assistance
Predictive search: Listens in on phone calls and automatically suggests resources staff can use to assist patients
Chatbots: Help patients get the answers they need, schedule appointments, and find the right representative to chat with – all without staff intervention
Automation also extends to compliance and threat prevention. Protected Health Information (PHI) lives on your phone system in call recordings, voicemail, transcriptions, caller ID, chatbots, texts, and fax transmissions. Modern contact center solutions feature encryption, secure storage, and robust access controls that automate HIPAA compliance and prevent healthcare hackers from infiltrating patient databases.
3. Integrations
Modern contact centers integrate with other software – primarily, EHR systems that house patient medical history, scheduling, and billing.
With EHR integration, contact centers make it easy for staff to instantly access patient data and provide personalized assistance. Automation features even make it possible for patients to self-schedule via their preferred communication channels.
4. Simplified Workflows
Digital transformation is more than just eliminating paper records. It’s about taking advantage of modern technologies to streamline workflows to the benefit of patients, staff, and healthcare organizations.
Modern healthcare contact centers offer:
Instant yet secure data access
Effortless collaboration
Remote staff support
These features create efficiencies that foster outstanding patient, provider, and staff experiences while reducing overall costs.
5. Analytics
Contact center analytics help healthcare administrators gain key insights into patient satisfaction and staff performance. Common data points include:
Average handle time
Abandonment rate
First contact resolution
Hold time
Transfer rate
Patient satisfaction score
Modern healthcare contact centers can automatically track and report on these and other metrics, allowing administrators to set benchmarks and develop strategies for continual improvement.
Obstacles to Modernization
Though the benefits of modernizing your healthcare organization’s contact center are numerous and impactful, modernization does present obstacles that must be addressed to ensure success.
1. Infrastructure
Aging infrastructures can cause bottlenecking, especially if you’re attempting to manage multiple platforms. They can also present challenges if your healthcare organization needs its contact center to work seamlessly with satellite clinics or if you want to make a move from an on-premise to a cloud or hybrid system.
Be aware that you might need to upgrade or replace some or all of your infrastructure when you upgrade to a modern contact center.
2. Budget
Budgeting is always an important consideration, so it’s important to consider where your contact center upgrade fits into your budget cycle.
Also, determine whether your contact center will be a capital expense or an operating expense. The answer will dictate how much you’ll pay upfront and monthly, and it could have tax implications.
3. Adoption and training
Overburdened medical providers have limited time to learn new software and workflows, so there are challenges from the ground up. That’s why it’s important to develop a training program that quickly and efficiently teaches providers and staff how to use the system for rapid adoption with minimal disruption.
5-Step Modernization Strategy
Modern contact centers benefit healthcare organizations by improving the patient, provider, and staff experience while increasing efficiency and reducing costs – but there are obstacles to getting there.
You need a sound strategy to plan and implement a new contact center solution if it’s going to perform as expected and yield maximum ROI.
1. Identify Your Unique Needs
Start by speaking with all stakeholders – patients, providers, staff, and call center agents – to identify your unique needs. You don’t want to end up with an out-of-the-box solution that does a lot of what you don’t need and a little of what you do need.
2. Explore Solutions
Explore various options and answer the following questions:
Do you want an on-premise or a cloud hosted system? A hybrid system?
Which solutions meet your unique needs?
Which solutions integrate with your EHR software?
How will they scale?
What are their pricing structures?
Learn more about how to choose a healthcare contact center.
3. Evaluate Your Infrastructure
Determine whether your infrastructure can support your desired solution and whether you’ll need to make upgrades. If you need upgrades, what will they cost?
4. Set a Budget and Timeline
Set a budget for your new contact center and any infrastructure upgrades. Then, create a roadmap for planning and implementation.
Depending on your organization’s size and complexity, the process could take anywhere from 60 days to 6 months or more.
5. Outline a Training Process
Develop a plan to train providers and staff to use the new system. You might encounter initial resistance from staff who are accustomed to your current system, so be prepared to explain how your new solution will benefit your team. Keep in mind that some providers, such as Cady, offer training to ensure a smooth transition.
Modernizing your contact center can deliver a host of benefits to your healthcare organization, but it requires a sound strategy to do it right. However, with so many considerations to make and hundreds of options on the market, how can you know which will truly satisfy patient expectations, streamline operations, and reduce costs?
In other words, which solutions are worth the investment?
Cady can help. Our technology advisors are well-versed in the latest contact center technologies, and we’ll work with you to tailor a modernization roadmap that meets your organization’s unique needs. Contact us to learn more.