25
Quick, this is a quiz. Without reading the balance of this post, how many call centers do you have in your hospital?
I have been amazed at the number of call centers I find in some very well run healthcare organizations. I am talking about providers … community hospitals with 18, 25 over 100 distinct call centers. Clearly, most of these are small clusters or “call groups” that have evolved independently across the enterprise. While many of these groups require “line of sight” proximity to the area they support, there is tremendous opportunity to co-locate significant portions of this capacity. Benefits of co-location include the potential to cross train and reduce overtime as one area covers for another in times of peak demand. In addition, management and supervisory functions may be reduced, creating capacity for additional, customer service oriented functions.
One of those “incoming” sources of demand is the extended web presence being developed by many of my clients. As the industry standard moves from online brochures to virtual tours and consumer centric transaction processing, more and more support will need to be provided to non-employees. If I take the time to register as a member of the health system community, and then need help resetting my password to check my lab results, what am I going to do? Who am I going to call? I can tell you from my personal experience with the airlines that I cannot complete an online transaction without that little head popping up and asking me if I need assistance.
Healthcare provider organizations have an opportunity to upgrade their capabilities in this area and run the table on improved customer experience.
http://www.infosci-journals.com/downloadPDF/pdf/ITJ3637_U0FCYR8XUf.pdf
From co-locating call centers, to extending web support through agents to “closing the sale” by making sure that the inquiring patient ends up booking the appointment – the opportunities to positively affect growth and efficiency are significant.
I am interested to hear from those of you who have explored this area and considered the enabling technologies including IVR, CTI, CRM, VOIP, and Campaign Management.
I think the numbers of call centers as an indicator of poor information flow is accurate and insightful. I would suggest that the number of call centers indicates another key problem with EHR implementations. Call centers reflect areas of ‘profound knowledge’ for a specific bit of information, but not a central point for all knowledge. Information is controlled and restricted by local gatekeepers. Until information flows can be mapped, improved, optimized and re-mapped with regard to business process, stakeholders, regulation, privacy and approvals, automation should not take place. My role in healthcare IT has been as a developer, implementor, business consultant, security designer, and project manager has lead me to the unshakable position that planning and design are paramount to healthcare IT projects. Consulting services such as the The Revere Group should be the first call any healthcare organization should make prior to any IT undertaking.
Hi - thanks for this interesting posting. Please pardon this, my English is not so good. German is my native tongue but I am trying to learn getting down English. Peace!
Hi and thanks for a informative blog. I am still thinking over what you posted.
Thanks for some good thoughts there. I am kind of new to the internet , so I printed this off to put in my file, any better way to go about keeping track of it then printing?
Great advice given in regards to my overall health.-Free Medication Help
@chels I know what you mean, its hard to find good help these days. People now days just don’t have the work ethic they used to have. I mean consider whoever wrote this post, they must have been working hard to write that good and it took a good bit of their time I am sure. I work with people who couldn’t write like this if they tried, and getting them to try is hard enough as it is.