June 2023 Issue of AnswerStat

Read the June 2023 issue of AnswerStat, the information hub for healthcare contact centers.



Feature Content:

AS TOC -June 2023

How Technology Can Help During Nurse Shortages, by Nicole Limpert
It’s clear that fewer nurses are helping more patients. Their workloads link to higher patient adverse outcomes, including patient mortality. . . . << read more >>

Vital Signs: Integrate with Your Organization: Don’t Stay in Your Silo or Function in Isolation, by Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Take steps to have your call center integrate with your organization to achieve optimum results for you, your company, and your customers. . . . << read more >>

Ten Years Ago: Three Reasons Your Emergency Plan Will Fail by Lucien Canton
Don’t convince yourself that having an emergency plan will protect you. Address three critical elements or your plan will fail. . . . << read more >>

Industry News

Solution Helps Customers Automate Call Handling and Improve Customer Service
Amtelco Installs Solar Panels

Send us your healthcare call center news for consideration in the next issue of AnswerStat.

Marketplace Directory: AnswerStat Directory of leading Healthcare Contact Center vendors:

LVM - Healthcare Contact Centers
Startel first impressions are everything
Pulsar360
Keona Health
Patients Count: Enterprise patient feedback solution

About AnswerStat
AnswerStat is the information hub for healthcare contact center news and resources, published specifically for hospital and medical contact centers and distributed free to qualified readers, decision -makers, and influencers at hospitals and healthcare contact centers worldwide.

Contact us for more information.

Integrate with Your Organization

Don’t Stay in Your Silo or Function in Isolation

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

I once needed to call a company in the healthcare sector. With their call center I encountered long wait times, surly representatives, and little help in resolving my dilemma. I made many unsuccessful phone calls. At last, one rep transferred me to a different department. My experience with that call center was the opposite of the first one.

The employee answered quickly, was cheerful, and offered help. In one phone call, lasting but a couple of minutes, she resolved my concern. I thanked her for her helpful resolution and remarked how difficult it was to get to her department. Her response took me aback.

“No one knows we exist,” she laughed. “We’re our company’s best kept secret.”

It seems she worked in a silo within her organization. Her silo functioned wonderfully, in contrast to the organization’s primary call center. What made the difference? I assume it was management, but that’s a topic for another time.

Today’s discussion is about integrating your call center with the rest of your organization.

It’s Us Instead of Them

When you integrate with your organization you move away from the mindset of us referring to the call center and them referring to the rest of the organization.

Instead, everyone in the company becomes us.

Making this mental switch is key. Without it, any plans to integrate with your organization will not succeed. Embracing a holistic us mentality is the first step to successfully integrate with your organization.

It’s Focusing on Others Instead of Self

As you make this mindset shift, you also shift your focus. By redefining us to include the entire organization, you encompass a greater set of employees who can band together to serve patients and callers. Isn’t that why your organization exists? To help patients and callers? To best accomplish this the focus must be on callers and what you can do—with your whole company behind you—to best address their concerns or needs.

It’s a Team Approach

This reformed focus embraces a team approach to problem solving. The goal isn’t to make yourself look good or even your whole department. The goal is to work as a team to make your organization look good. When you do this you and your company win, and—more importantly —so do your patients and callers.

Implementation

This grand vision to integrate with your organization is easier to visualize than to realize.

Though you can start it from within your call center, it will take time to permeate through your entire organization. It’s easier when the initiative comes from the C-suite. And, of course, some managers will resist this change. But this reveals their selfishness. They’re more concerned about maintaining the status quo than about what’s best for the organization and your customers.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.

Read more of his articles or his book, Healthcare Call Center Essentials.

How Technology Can Help During Nurse Shortages

1Call

By Nicole Limpert

We have all seen reports and heard stories about how nurses have left the medical field amid the pandemic. In truth, the United States healthcare system has been experiencing a series of nursing shortages for decades—studies dating back to the 1920s point to low wages and undesirable working conditions.

Federal regulation 42CFR 482.23(b) requires hospitals certified to participate in Medicare to “have adequate numbers of licensed registered nurses, licensed practical nurses, and other personnel to provide nursing care to all patients as needed. There must be supervisory and staff personnel for each department or nursing unit to ensure, when needed, the immediate availability of a registered nurse for bedside care of any patient.”

However, the regulation does not provide a clear nurse-to-patient staffing ratio. It is the responsibility of each state to determine appropriate staffing needs. What is clear is that fewer nurses are helping more patients, and their excessive workloads are linked to higher patient adverse outcomes, including patient mortality.

Useful Technology to Streamline Workflows

Any technology that automates and simplifies nursing duties will free nurses to spend more time with their patients which leads to better patient outcomes. According to an article by Katherine Virkstis, ND and Karen Drenkard, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN entitled, “It Is Time to Focus Digital Strategy on Supporting Nurse Workflow,” there are many technologies healthcare organizations can leverage to improve nurse workflows. Some of the solutions they list include:

  • Technology-driven pumps and monitors that automate the collection of information needed for care.
  • Smart devices, including automated beds and vital sign monitoring.
  • Wearables that provide clinical data to the provider.
  • Electronic white boards integrated with the electronic health record to keep patients and families up to date.
  • Centralized data command centers that integrate multiple systems into a single monitoring center, including coordination of care, requests for services, and discharge tracking.
  • Tele-technology that enables virtual inpatient care models, including virtual sitter and virtual expert RN models.
  • Mobile apps that enable bidirectional communication between patients and clinicians across all levels of care.

Tapping into Remote and Part-time Workforces

Currently, the average age of a nurse is around 52, and there are concerns that 4 million nurses will retire by 2030. This will only exacerbate future nursing shortages. However, technology can provide a way for retired nurses, or those who are on their way to retirement and want to work less hours, to provide non-traditional care and support to patients.

Virtual nursing is a newer model of care that provides nurses with a flexible, less demanding schedule. Virtual nursing can include anything from nursing triage or nurse on-call via telehealth, to overseeing alarms and alerts in a command center.

Nurses can use telehealth to prescreen patients for virtual appointments. Depending on the patient’s needs and if the nurse is advanced enough, virtual nurses can even meet with patients for their telehealth visit and avoid handing off the appointment to a physician.

Instead of the traditional bedside nurse capturing patient health data while also trying to care for patients, health systems can dedicate virtual nurses to conduct pain assessments and data collection remotely. They can look at lab values, alarm notifications, and other monitor alerts and escalate when appropriate.

Where Are the Next Generation of Nurses?

Another contributing factor to the nursing shortage is the scarcity of nursing school instructors. It has been common for nursing programs to use a lottery system for selection into their programs for years. The 2020-2021 Enrollment and Graduations in Baccalaureate and Graduate Programs in Nursing report (also here) from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) states, “U.S. nursing schools turned away 80,521 qualified applications from baccalaureate and graduate nursing programs in 2020 due to an insufficient number of faculty, clinical sites, classroom space, clinical preceptors, and budget constraints.” The report further says most universities cited a lack of qualified teaching faculty as a key reason for having to reject the qualified nursing applicants.

When instruction doesn’t require teachers and students to be physically present in a classroom, technology can play a role in addressing the educational needs of students by using online education. Virtual learning won’t completely replace traditional instruction, however Virtual Reality (VR) simulation and high-fidelity simulation that uses realistic, life-like manikins (a full-body patient simulator) to mimic human anatomy and physiology can teach clinical skills and help alleviate the instructor shortage.

Overcoming Negative Aspects of Technology

Sometimes, you can have too much of a good thing. One of the major challenges of using multiple technologies is when they are not interoperable or don’t function smoothly in a clinical setting. Health systems must avoid having a scenario where the nurse becomes a human interface between disparate and clunky technologies. If nurses are recording data from one system into another or logging in and out of multiple technologies, inefficiencies take up their time and keep them away from patients.

Ideally, design thinking principles are part of the process when creating tech solutions. Input from the people who are going to use the technology from the beginning, during usability testing, and throughout implementation will ensure the technology works smoothly in real-world application.

It’s essential for technology companies to have this usability component to make sure their designs won’t negatively impact nurses and other clinicians.

How Contact Center Software Fits In

Hospital contact centers are the communication hubs for the hospital enterprise. They not only handle a multitude of different calls, the same communications integration engine software used by a hospital call center can also integrate with technologies being used to address the nursing shortage. With the right integration engine acting as a bridge between software solutions, contact centers, and other devices, hospitals can be sure the solutions they are using to streamline nursing workflows speak to each other to communicate quickly and seamlessly.

These systems, leveraging standardized communication protocols like HL7, eliminate the chaos of moving information between systems and between people. Integration engines act as the glue that holds these many IT systems together and translates a variety of different inputs in such a way that other solutions can interpret the data and react accordingly.

1Call, a division of Amtelco

Nicole Limpert is the marketing content writer for 1Call, a division of Amtelco.

The May 2023 Issue of Medical Call Center News



Read the May 2023 issue of Medical Call Center News.

Medical Call Center News is an e-newsletter published by Peter DeHaan Publishing Inc, in conjunction with AnswerStat magazine.

Please tell your coworkers about Medical Call Center News.

Thank you!

[Medical Call Center News is published by Peter DeHaan Publishing IncPeter Lyle DeHaan, editor.]

Amtelco Installs Solar Panels

1Call

1Call, a division of Amtelco, announced that Amtelco has completed its long-awaited solar panel project and had begun using solar energy to help reduce its carbon footprint and fossil energy usage. Amtelco is forecasting to offset its energy consumption with solar power by 59 percent of its current use.

In the past, Amtelco’s building manager had researched how their HQ building in McFarland, WI, could cover a significant portion of its roof with solar. At the time, it wasn’t a feasible option for the company. However, in the fall of 2021, Tom Curtin, CEO of Amtelco, decided to take another look. Tom says, “Knowing that our roof has 100% exposure to that beautiful southern sun would always make me think, ‘Someday it would be so great to be able to go green with that roof.’ I am so excited that through all the Amtelco teams’ efforts, we finally made that dream a reality!”

According to the EPA, electric power generates the second largest share of greenhouse gas emissions. Tom continues, “For many years, it was just a wonderful wish to reduce the greenhouse gas contribution we make. We are fortunate that Amtelco has been successful. And so, we invested in our community and the future of our families through renewable energy.”

Amtelco has been eco-minded and dedicated to recycling in the office for years. Recently, Amtelco concluded a six-month period of collecting eligible plastic bags, films, wraps, etc., for the Trex Company’s Recycle Beyond the Bag program to earn a Trex® bench made from the recycled materials.

1Call, a division of Amtelco

As a leading provider of innovative communication applications for more than 45 years, the 1Call Division of Amtelco is a leader in developing software solutions and applications created for the specific needs of the healthcare contact center marketplace.

Solution Helps Customers Automate Call Handling and Improve Customer Service

1Call

Amtelco Genesis Intelligent Series v5.5 rated “Avaya Compliant” with Avaya Aura® Session Manager and Avaya Aura Communication Manager

1Call, a division of Amtelco and a leader in developing software solutions and applications designed for the healthcare communications and contact center marketplace, announced its Genesis Intelligent Series v5.5 is compliant with key Avaya solutions—helping customers enhance call processing to prioritize critical calls, and improve call routing and management. Avaya is a global leader in solutions that enhance and simplify communications and collaboration.

The Genesis solution delivers an all-inclusive, enterprise-wide contact center with skills-based automatic call distribution (ACD), built-in speech recognition, text to speech, and voice services helping improve call routing and management. Using the software, customers can track metrics with customizable reporting, enhance accountability with call logging and video screen capture, connect remote agents, and manage automated dispatch and on-call scheduling. The Genesis solution can be operated in a virtual server environment or in the cloud. The application is now compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with Avaya Aura Session Manager 10.1 and Avaya Aura Communication Manager 10.1 via SIP Trunk.

“We are thrilled that our Genesis Intelligent Series v5.5 has successfully completed this latest Avaya DevConnect compliance testing,” said Tom Curtin, CEO of Amtelco and 1Call. “Amtelco’s ongoing membership as a technology partner in the Avaya DevConnect program helps ensure that we provide our shared customers with the newest technology advancements.”

Eric Rossman, vice president, Strategic Alliances and Technology Partners, Avaya, said, “Technology partners like Amtelco are helping Avaya customers increase their efficiency, productivity, and strengthen their competitiveness.”

Amtelco is a Technology Partner in the Avaya DevConnect program, an integral network of Avaya experts, partners, developers, and customers. This unique global collaborative is exceptionally positioned to deliver the next-gen customer and employee experiences businesses need through Avaya’s Cloud Communications Portfolio, including the Avaya Experience Platform. Partners in the DevConnect program develop, market, and sell innovative third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology and extend the value of a company’s investment in its network.

As a Technology Partner, Amtelco can submit products to Avaya for compliance testing, where a team of DevConnect engineers develops a comprehensive test plan for each application to verify its Avaya compatibility. This enables customers to confidently add best-in-class capabilities to their network without having to replace their existing infrastructure—helping speed deployment of new applications and reduce both network complexity and implementation costs.

1Call, a division of Amtelco

The 1Call Division of Amtelco is the leader in developing software solutions and applications designed for the specific needs of the healthcare call center marketplace. 1Call features a complete line of modular solutions specifically designed to streamline enterprise-wide communications, save an organization’s limited resources, and make them tremendously efficient, helping them bring wellness to their members and their bottom line.

Learn more about how Amtelco is part of Avaya’s DevConnect program and Avaya’s other partner programs.

April 2023 Issue of AnswerStat

Read the April 2023 issue of AnswerStat, the information hub for healthcare contact centers.



Feature Content:

AS April 2023

Do Your Call Center Employees Believe They Receive Adequate Recognition? by Mike Hill
Without recognizing employee contributions, they can feel disconnected from your organization, and disconnected employees are the least productive. . . . << read more >>

Vital Signs: Integrate Your Call Center Tools, by Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Integrate your call center tools to optimize your operation: enhance outcomes, increase agent workflows, and improve customer satisfaction. . . . << read more >>

Guest Column: Using Technology to Support a Strong Patient Access and Retention Strategy by Mark Dwyer
Strengthen your patient access and retention strategy by implementing these components in your healthcare contact center. . . .  << read more >>

Scripting Helps Hospital Call Center Manage 850,000 Calls Per Year by Nicole Limpert
A phone call is often the first connection a patient makes with a hospital, and the operator’s ability to handle the call professionally is critical in the patient experience. . . . << read more >>

Ten Years Ago: Sharpen Your Healthcare Contact Centers’ Reflexes to Better Respond to the Unexpected by Matt McConnell
Help managers gain more control, agents become more proficient at their jobs, and patients and customers receive a better overall experience. . . .  << read more >>

Industry News

1Call Announces the Wisconsin State Journal Named Amtelco as a Winner of the Madison, WI Top Workplaces 2023 Award

Send us your healthcare call center news for consideration in the next issue of AnswerStat.

Marketplace Directory: AnswerStat Directory of leading Healthcare Contact Center vendors:

LVM - Healthcare Contact Centers
Startel first impressions are everything
Pulsar360
Keona Health
Patients Count: Enterprise patient feedback solution

About AnswerStat
AnswerStat is the information hub for healthcare contact center news and resources, published specifically for hospital and medical contact centers and distributed free to qualified readers, decision -makers, and influencers at hospitals and healthcare contact centers worldwide.

Contact us for more information.

Integrate Your Call Center Tools

Make Sure Each Piece of Contact Center Technology Works as a Seamless System

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, Ph.D.

In continuing our series on call center integration, we move to the topic of technology, specifically the need to integrate your call center tools. Today’s vendors offer a wide array of technology options to enhance the contact center operation. Yet if these tools don’t integrate with each other, we lose—or even negate—their promised productivity pronouncements.

Technology tools that won’t talk with one another is almost as detrimental as not having the tools in the first place. Therefore, it’s essential that we integrate our contact centers’ tools and technology. That’s why you need to integrate your call center tools.

Interoperability

We’ve all called places and given basic information in step one of the contact, only to have to repeat it in step two. This happens too often, and it infuriates callers, setting the stage for ineffective communications from the onset of a contact. I’ve also had cases where I had to repeat the same information a second time. Another company made me reconfirm my identity each time they transferred my call.

Today’s consumers—your healthcare systems’ patients and customers—deserve better. And they expect more. Complete integration passes on all collected information through each step of the call. This includes transfers, switching channels, and moving between systems.

Databases

Today’s healthcare providers amass a plethora of information. This data ends up in a database. But not just one. Multiple databases. Too often inter-database integration is nonexistent. Even a basic interface is missing.

This requires contact center agents and healthcare professionals to re-enter information, transferring it from one database to another. Sometimes this requires rekeying, which is time consuming and error prone. Even copy-and-paste functionality fails to provide the desired ease of information transfer.

Then with the same information existing in two places, a nonintegrated environment means that updates must also occur in two—or more—places. This seldom happens and points to the need to better integrate your call center tools.

I know. In the past week I’ve had two organizations try to call me on a number I haven’t had in eight years. Though I let them know of the change when I moved, not everyone’s records received the update. Hence needless frustration on their part and mine.

Apps

Similar to databases are apps and software. Though on a basic level this is addressed with interoperability initiatives and database integration, more work still needs to be done.

Many times I’ve had reps tell me they were writing down the information I gave them so they wouldn’t have to have me repeat it as they moved from one program to another. I’ve also had instances where they didn’t write down what I gave them, but they tried to remember it. And they remembered it wrong. This meant I had to give them the same information again.

Does your message taking app integrate with your appointment setting app? Does your answering service software integrate with your telephone triage software? Does your class scheduling program interface with your literature request program?

Conclusion

To provide a holistic and satisfying solution to your patients and customers, you need to fully integrate your call center tools to optimize your operation. When you do so you will enhance outcomes, increase agent workflows, and improve customer satisfaction.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat. He’s a passionate wordsmith whose goal is to change the world one word at a time.

Read more of his articles or his book, Healthcare Call Center Essentials.

Do Your Call Center Employees Believe They Receive Adequate Recognition?

Patients-Count: Enterprise patient feedback solution

By Mike Hill

If you are like most companies, you have a mix of employees working full-time from the office and others working full-time from a remote office, or a third group that work sometimes from the office and some from a remote location. Whichever case you have, you need to make sure all your employees receive adequate recognition.

Without recognizing your employees’ contributions, they can feel disconnected from your organization, and disconnected employees are the ones that are the least productive. In this article, we will concentrate on employees working from a call center. Without having face-to-face contact, recognition can be challenging, but it can be done.

Recognition has been described as a “core” human need. So, what can recognition do for your organization?

  • It can boost the employee experience helping them to feel more competent and boost their self-esteem.
  • It can help lower turnover. When employees’ achievements and efforts are recognized, they feel connected and valued. This acts as a motivator to repeat excellent performance.
  • When you become known as a company that recognizes your employees, as compared to a company that does not, you will attract that level of employee that will make your company successful.

So, how do you take advantage of an employee recognition program for call centers?

You use some of the same techniques you use to recognize any other employee:

  • Make sure the employee is aware of what results will be recognized. Think measurable criteria.
  • Decide on what the rewards will be. Ask for employee input.
  • Make it personal. Call the employee; visit them in person.
  • Announce to the rest of the call center who you’re recognizing and why.

Finally, and this is particularly important to call center employees: a recognition program helps your agents to find the why with regard to their job. Author Simon Sinek states that when an employee knows their why behind their job, they become more engaged, more motivated to perform at a higher level, and more inspired.

How do you know when you are meeting or even exceeding your employees desire to be recognized? You need to ask them. Do not assume you know what they are thinking or feeling.

Mike Hill is the employee experience expert at Mobius Vendor Partners and author of Measuring to Manage. At Mobius Vendor Partners, their employee experience team has the expertise and software to make sure employees are equipped with the material and tools to make them productive.

LVM Guest Column

LVM Systems

Using Technology to Support a Strong Patient Access and Retention Strategy

By Mark Dwyer

Today, interoperability and integration are standard must-haves for successful healthcare contact center software. Healthcare systems must provide a contact center solution that utilizes multiple channels to deliver accurate answers and quick responsiveness. Customers now expect this level of service and seek out organizations that provide it.

Let’s first look at the benefits interoperability offers. Many older customers remain most comfortable with traditional face-to-face, email, or phone interactions with their healthcare providers. Consequently, these communications methodologies remain critical.

However, hospitals must embrace new, interactive technologies to capture today’s Millennials and Gen Z healthcare consumers. These customers prefer to chat, group text, receive secure messages, and interact with a dynamic self-service web app. The interactive technologies you use may determine the future success of your patient access and retention strategy.

We begin by looking at one of the tactically strategic components, the user-friendly, self-service web app. This outreach tool should include quickly accessing subject-relevant topics and current health information. It must also provide the ability to self-refer to an appropriate physician.

Data about the physician should include demographics, insurance eligibility, and procedural payment estimates. When using the self-service web app, consumers also need the ability to register for classes, screenings, and any available population health programs. In addition, a quality, healthcare self-service web app should support hospital/patient transfer and marketing outreach programs. Finally, it must also support real-time, bi-directional chat capabilities.

Other interoperable technologies such as secure messaging, group texting, and an integrated answering service function also are critical in a healthcare contact center.

For example, sending personal health information to a patient about upcoming hospital procedures or needed follow-up requires using an encrypted, secure messaging portal. In addition, often, when serving elderly patients, the ability to group text to the patient, their caregiver, and out-of-state family members reinforces your patient/hospital bond.

This technology will reduce the elderly patient’s need to be the historian of their information. In addition, offering an integrated answering service option to your on-staff providers improves their relationship with your patients and your organization.

Having discussed how an interoperable solution can improve your patient access and retention strategy, let’s discuss how system integration through data sharing across multiple entities further enhances your efforts.

Sharing data between the hospital’s contact center and other shareholders depends on the ability of the contact center software to ingest data from multiple data sources. Today, customers expect that all participants in their healthcare journey have access to their cumulative health history.

Successful contact center solutions address this expectation from the very beginning. Examples include:

  • Use phone integrations to receive a notification when a call comes in and automatically populate the caller information based on the phone number while simultaneously starting a transaction.
  • Integrate your hospital Electronic Medical Record (EMR) with the contact center to provide the nurse access to additional health information.
  • Send messages from your EMR to the contact center application to initiate smart actions with your clients, customers, or patients. For example, upon discharge, the software can assign follow-up calls to conduct satisfaction surveys and verify that the patient saw the referred to physician, filled any prescribed medications, and took them as directed.
  • Create post-op messages to trigger the software to notify caregivers of any next steps. 
  • Use HL7 triggers to create limitless possibilities for interactions and data exchanges.

Another vital component of a patient access and retention strategy is to use customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns to mine your contact center’s transactional and demographic databases to target appropriate customers for applicable programs and services.

Look for a contact center system with CRM capabilities built into the software, preferably with cross-marketing codes visible during the call. These codes enable contact center representatives to find other relevant programs for the caller, increasing the available service offerings.

Last, but certainly not least, is the need for a healthcare contact center solution that can measure your patient access and retention system’s value to your organization’s bottom line. Access to the wealth of data described above should enable you to generate extensive ROI (return on investment) reporting through the contact center’s real-time data analytics. Use this information to fine-tune your strategies to better align with organizational goals.

So where does your healthcare contact center stand? Are you out front leading the industry, at the back of the pack, or somewhere in the middle?

Wherever your contact center ranks, you can strengthen your patient access and retention strategy by implementing these components in your healthcare contact center.

LVM Systems logo

Mark Dwyer is the COO at LVM Systems.

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