Vendor Spotlight on Clinical Solutions



Today’s health systems demand highly customized solutions and solid customer support to meet growing market demands.

Healthcare organizations in today’s ever-changing healthcare environment are increasingly demanding IT solutions that can be both wide-ranging and customized to meet their individualized needs. Clinical Solutions’ advanced IntefleCS Healthcare Contact Management solution is designed to do just that via a cutting-edge integration of its six powerful modules into one robust system that can be as flexible or as standardized as users need from their telephone triage requirements to post-discharge follow-up.

These solutions enable organizations to manage all aspects of their clinical or marketing offerings, including applications for telephone triage, physician and service referral, class and appointment scheduling, outbound campaigns, and business intelligence for ad hoc reporting.

Additionally, an exclusively designed readmission management module assists staff in helping specific patient-populations effectively and collaboratively manage their health condition by providing post-discharge support to avoid unnecessary readmissions. The system fully supports accountable care organizations, transitional care programs, and medical home initiatives.

Customization, Ongoing Support Meet Key Needs: When Southeast Alabama Medical Center, an expanding 420-bed regional medical facility in Dothan, Alabama, began to outgrow its call center solution, department managers convened to target their pain points and assess their future needs. The center’s ten staff nurses were already handling an average volume of 18,000 calls per month, with no slow down expected. Call center managers determined that their growing operations would require a medical call center solution that could not only be highly customized but that also came with strong, ongoing client support. They needed to be able to better track their call volumes, enable staff to access content specific to the types of calls they were receiving, and improve their overall call flow to achieve better efficiencies.

Rules and Algorithms Customized: Clinical Solutions’ implementation team was first able to customize the look and feel of the system by capitalizing on the inherent intuitiveness of its solution and significant customization capacities. This step alone helped minimize the learning curve of and disturbances to staff while they were working, notes Melanie McKnight, division director of registration services.

To achieve this key step, the Clinical Solutions team made a number of on-site visits to the facility to observe and understand the call center’s existing workflow processes. Then, they designed a solution to not only support the existing workflow but also, in many cases, recommend a more efficient workflow based on the design teams’ vast experience and in-depth knowledge from similar scenarios and past installations. Many of the hospital’s existing custom guidelines were easily integrated. Some much-needed modifications, which were once arduous to incorporate, were easily implemented. “Being able to amend existing custom guidelines easily has saved the staff hours each month,” says Kevin Ross, RN, clinical coordinator, who oversees Southeast Alabama’s medical call center.

Clinical Content More Individualized For Callers: Additionally, the Clinical Solutions team configured the system to allow staff to easily manage their own clinical content such as surveys, nursing assessments, and post-triage scripts, thereby making them more responsive to the needs of the various clients and patients they serve.

CHF Program Helps Manage and Better Control Readmissions: With IntefleCS’s easy-to-use content authoring, the call center was able to easily integrate Southeast Alabama’s own congestive heart failure (CHF) disease management content and implement a workflow that allows them to manage their post-discharge program. As a result, they introduced a new outbound service to better serve their patient population and reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions for patients recently discharged with CHF. The service was successfully piloted in one area of the hospital and subsequently rolled out system-wide.

Call Volume and Reporting Better Managed: Staff are also able to capture their call volumes more accurately, specifically follow-up calls, which are now created as a separate call type – a new step they were not previously able to do. This feature is a vast improvement in reporting and helps better monitor call volume.

The IntefleCS Healthcare Contact Management solution seamlessly supports Southeast Alabama’s medical call center in managing every aspect of their call center. Clinical Solutions continues to enhance its product offerings to its many hospital and other healthcare clients in the United States. They recently expanded services to the larger Canadian provinces.

To learn more about how Clinical Solutions can help you in managing your organization’s healthcare contact center or to learn more about the company’s services and other offerings, contact Clinical Solutions at 888-531-9206 .

[From the August/September 2013 issue of AnswerStat magazine]