Resurrection Health Care Tracks Revenue and Demonstrates Contact Center Value



By Patty Maynard

As hospital contact centers are tasked with being more accountable to their healthcare systems, measuring return on investment (ROI) becomes a necessity. A contact center with built-in accountability can show its worth to the organization through demonstrating its ability to generate revenue and increase market share.

For Resurrection Health Care in Chicago, change has come in the shape of hospitals bought and sold, staff realignments and reductions, and a merger with Provena Health in November 2011 that formed Illinois’ largest Catholic healthcare system. Throughout these changes, Resurrection Health Care has operated its contact center with RelayHealth products for marketing campaign management and triage since 1993. In 2007, Resurrection added RelayCare Revenue Tracker to help the contact center determine the effectiveness of these campaigns in generating revenue.

With Revenue Tracker, organizations can measure the revenue impact of direct and indirect services and calculate the financial impact of selected programs or the entire contact center. It also features intelligent technology that helps reduce the effort required to confirm partial matches and reduce the number of duplicate records.

Key Contributions and Compelling Numbers: Call Center Director Cheryl Dusenbery has worked at Resurrection for sixteen years. With Revenue Tracker, the center can follow a patient’s path from first contact to any financial service in the hospital and credit the revenue generated to the correct marketing campaign.

“If someone calls in looking for a doctor and gets a referral, for example, and nine months later they’re back in to deliver a baby, we’re able to match our call records with the hospital’s financial records and reconcile the revenue,” Dusenbery said. “Without RelayCare Revenue Tracker, it would be a totally manual process, and it would be nearly impossible.”

In fiscal year 2011, $32 million in incremental revenue at six hospitals could be correlated to contact center calls. This is an increase in revenue of approximately $330,000 per hospital when compared to the $35 million in revenue generated in fiscal year 2010 over seven hospitals.

“The average revenue per call for fiscal year 2011 was $925. That’s a nice thing to be able to say to a CEO, and it helps them understand the contact center’s value,” Dusenbery said. “They see the value in what we bring to the table. It brings credibility to the marketing team and the contact center.”

By using a file extract from an organization’s financial system to match revenue against contact center encounters, Revenue Tracker can assist contact center managers as they:

  • Generate reports showing gross and net contribution
  • Demonstrate financial value and impact resulting from contact center operations
  • Report against multiple time periods with criteria to account for multiple variables

“When I talk with other facilities, I stress how important it is to position the numbers as a correlation,” Dusenbery said. “If someone fills out a card to get a thermometer, or if you’re trying to track what you get from a physician’s lecture, that’s incremental revenue that demonstrates the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.”

Revenue Tracker has also helped with resource decisions in the contact center. Staff can be added during hours when call volumes or the average revenue per call are higher or reduced when they are lower.

“We can track callers by outcomes, by the number of calls taken by nurses or representatives, or by the percentage that generate revenue,” Dusenbery added. “We’re able to decide by looking at the results whether it’s more cost-effective to have nurses go out into the work force or to other call centers.”

Conclusion: Whether demonstrating or determining its worth to the organization, Resurrection Health Care’s contact center has received the help it needed from Revenue Tracker. Tremendous amounts of data have been processed during the time that RelayCare has been in use at Resurrection Health Care. In that time, it has also added and removed hospitals from its roster. Through it all, RelayHealth has been a partner in keeping the information flowing.

“Every time we added a hospital, we wondered, ‘What’s going to happen now?’” Dusenbery said. “Each one is a giant influx of data, and we worked hand-in-hand with RelayHealth to make sure we could handle it.”

Patty Maynard is the solution line leader for RelayCare.

[From the June/July 2012 issue of AnswerStat magazine]