Healthcare IT Insights

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.

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One of the hot drivers of Web 2.0 in Healthcare is the concept of Social Media. User-generated content and interconnected and interactive web applications have changed where we find information and how we interact with other people. Health Social Media (Health 2.0) uses these new technologies to promote collaboration between patients, caregivers, medical professionals and other stakeholders in health. The following provides examples of various categories of Health Social Media.

Health Social Media

PatientsLikeMe (www.patientslikeme.com)

Daily Strength (www.dailystregth.com)

Sermo (www.sermo.com)

MySpace – CURE DIABETES Group

Health Wickis

FluWiki (www.newfluwiki2.com)

Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.com)

Blogs

DiabetesMine (www.diabetesmine.com)

Prostate-Health (www.prostate-help.org)

WebMD (http://webmd.com/community/blogs)

Health Podcasts

Johns Hopkins (www.hopkinsmedicine.org/mediaII/Podcasts.html)

Podcast Health on HIV/AIDS (www.podcasthealth.com)

Health Video Sharing

icYou (www.icyou.com)

YouTube (http://youtube.com)

As it relates to consumers of health services and patients as a subset of that stakeholder group, expectations for social media interaction with healthcare organizations are being driven up by their experience with other common tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and MySpace. While much of this is a generational trend, we are at or beyond the tipping-point where people of all ages and socio-economic levels are engaging in on-line communities. The time is past where forward-thinking healthcare organizations can write this off as a fad or by concluding that “older people” (traditionally heavy consumers of all types of health services) don’t like to use the computer. While we may not be at the point where we can assume all consumers and patients will opt into electronic communities, we must certainly consider how the notion of community can contribute to marketing plans for strategic service lines.

I look forward to your comments and additional input on various social websites that relate to health and wellness.