By Nicole Limpert

There is a lot of coordination involved when getting a patient from point A to point B. That is why hospital systems will have a dedicated patient transfer center to coordinate inpatient-to-inpatient, emergency department-to-emergency department, and hospital-to-hospital transfers for adult and pediatric patients. Communication occurs between medical staff and the call center agent.

Patients may be admitted to a hospital from their home, workplace, other hospitals, or clinics. They can arrive a variety of ways including via ambulance or helicopter, or they may already be within a hospital but need to be moved throughout the facility for tests, treatment, surgery, recovery, and visits with other medical personnel located on a hospital campus.

Patient Transfer Call Center

Patient transfer centers are dedicated call centers that provide a way for medical personnel to reach an appropriate hospital or specialist for their patient’s needs when they must transfer a patient from an outside hospital or residence, or within their healthcare organization. Typically, a referring physician calls one number that directs them immediately to the patient transfer center.

The operators at these centers are experienced professionals and are often registered nurses or EMTs with critical care experience. They are available 24/7 and have access to vast hospital and clinical networks. They conveniently and efficiently coordinate:

• Emergency transfers or direct admissions.
• Securing an accepting physician.
• Bed assignments.
• Paramedic and ambulance arrangements.
• Transfers for critical care such as burns, cardiac, or stroke.
• On-going communication with referring physicians.

Patient Transfer Centers and Call Center Software

Calls come into a patient transfer center in a variety of ways including via two-way radio, web, phones, and various apps. The workstation of one of these operators often has the same layout as a 911 dispatcher with at least three computer monitors, multiple keyboards, mice, and sometimes foot pedals while also using a radio.

This mixture of components from different vendors all have their own software. It is paramount that the call center software they use can seamlessly integrate with the different technologies to streamline communication and workflows.

When a call comes in the agent will immediately ask for the accepting and referring physician’s name, the patient’s name, the current location of the patient, the patient’s diagnosis, and specific medical needs. This information helps operators assess the patient’s needs and arrange for the transfer.

Patient transfer centers must ensure that their call center software can provide conference bridges and conference joins for physician consults, offer customizable scripting options to help walk operators through a dizzying array of calls, and is supported by a reliable, single source of truth directory to ensure that all updates propagate to the entire system without duplication.

Connecting with On-Call Medical Staff

Patient transfer centers give their agents the authority to access and view on-call schedules in real-time. To connect with on-call medical staff, many centers use a HIPAA-compliant secure mobile messaging app to ensure security when communicating about a person’s health. 

These apps provide end-to-end encryption and can integrate with the center’s software to send secure texts, photos, videos, and audio files. Operators can use the app from their desktop or any smart device.

Once a message is sent, agents can see if it was delivered and read. If they don’t receive a response from the person on-call, they can escalate it to another physician. These apps usually provide a way to track message activity, including a message log, message histories, indicate to whom messages were sent, when messages were read, who replied to a message, and so forth. The apps can present the data as reports for hospital and call center managers. 

The Importance of Recording and Reporting

The patient transfer center must keep reports for hospital leadership. Reports such as physician transfer choices, number of transfers, and call logs provide data to help protect callers, operators, and hospital systems in litigious situations. Calls, screen capture videos and images, messages, and more can be recorded, tracked, time-stamped, and stored.

Call analytics also help the patient transfer center improve workflows and increase caller satisfaction. It is important that reports can be customized, however, there are common reports that provide helpful information such as:

• Agent Activity: Analytics about an agent’s activity including number of calls, holds, conference time, dispatch activity, and events such as login/out and ready/not ready.
• Billing: Centers that need to charge departments or facilities for services can use billing codes to track accounts and their call activity for invoicing.
• Call Details: Detailed call information including dispatch jobs, dial-out activity, messages, message history, events by agent, speech recognition events, and live call information.
• Call Traffic: An interval-based assessment of live call traffic to help gauge call volume and agent staffing.

Every patient transfer center is different and has different needs. However, they all require an enormous amount of coordination. Transporting patients can be a life-saving effort and is an integral part of patient flow, patient care, and the patient experience. It is critical that patient transfer centers use a robust call center software program that readily integrates with other products to increase efficiency.

Nicole Limpert is the marketing content writer for Amtelco and their 1Call Healthcare Division. Amtelco is a leading provider of innovative communication applications. 1Call develops software solutions and applications designed for the specific needs of healthcare organizations.

By Mark Dwyer

One of the most significant challenges hospitals faced over the past two years was handling the heightened number of ED calls and visits due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In many areas of the country, staff had to perform at heroic levels. And due to the ongoing variants, some are still facing tremendous challenges.

Having spent my career in the healthcare call center industry, I was pleased to see call centers across the country step up and field calls from millions of concerned individuals. However, much more is possible. 

Today’s call centers efficiently handle both clinical and non-clinical inbound and outbound calls. In addition, many accept text messages and bi-directional chats to facilitate patient access to care. These expanded communication options provided much-needed additional contact points during the pandemic. So, what other opportunities exist for the call center to play an even greater role? 

Front-Ending Clinical Calls

One such option is to position non-clinical agents to front-end clinical calls asking a brief set of questions to determine severity. Then, if the call meets any of four to five critical conditions pre-defined by the hospital, the front-ender passes the call off to a live Triage Nurse. If the call is determined to be less critical, it is placed into the nurses’ call-back queue for the next available nurse to process.

For decades, Triage Call Center nurses have used clinically proven protocols to guide callers, based on the severity of their symptoms, to the appropriate sources of care. In addition, the same clinical authors who wrote the Gold-Standard of triage protocols have added and revised multiple COVID-19 protocols and Care Advice over the past two years, enabling call center nurses also to triage COVID-19 patients. 

Now, the call center nurse can triage COVID-19 patients directing them to “call 911,” “go to the ED,” “Go to Urgent Care,” “See their PCP,” or provide home care instructions (among other endpoints). Doing so can redirect numerous patients to less urgent care options before they arrive at the ED unnecessarily. 

Follow-Up Options

After completing the triage portion of the call, if appropriate, the nurse can pass the call to a non-clinical call center agent to share directions to the referred facility, hours of operation, information on where to park, rules regarding caregivers accompanying the patient, and so forth.

If the patient requires admission to the ED, through integration to the hospital’s EMR system, the call center agent can keep the caregiver advised of the patient’s progress. This way, the agent can text the caregivers to update the patient’s status and discharge plans. In addition, when appropriate, the agent could either fax, text, or send by secure message any follow-up instructions for the patient.

The next day, the nurse or agent should call the patient or caregiver to make sure the patient filled any prescriptions they received, scheduled a follow-up appointment with their PCP, and followed other discharge instructions. Not only does this engender tremendous goodwill, but it often can be all that is needed to keep the patient from returning to the ED. 

Summary

To provide an effective integrated solution, the call center must work across the healthcare delivery system. It needs to team not only with its ED but also with area hospitals, emergent and urgent care centers, wellness and preventive care facilities, PCPs, and other services often needed by patients seeking care post-ED. If so, by creating a network of healthcare providers willing to accept and treat patients within reasonable timeframes, call centers can build trust in patients, so they are confident in the information and resources provided.

Mark Dwyer is LVM Systems’ chief operations officer. He has more than a quarter century of experience in the healthcare call center industry.

By Donna Martin 

While healthcare has traditionally been more reactive in nature, consumerism is driving a shift toward a model that is more proactive and puts patients at the center. As providers compete ever more fiercely for less revenue due to the financial crisis brought on by COVID-19, we fully expect to see a heavier focus on the consumerization of healthcare this year, and a major boost to patient experience as a result.

In fact, consumerism has already changed patient-facing communications for hospitals and health systems. This shift has been so major that many healthcare leaders are looking to other industries—such as banking and retail—to uncover best practices to adapt to the healthcare setting. After all, the people who shop at Amazon.com are the same people who shop for healthcare—and the experience of the former informs their expectations for the latter.

As a result of consumerism’s influence, delivering an exceptional patient experience is more important than ever, and first impressions are critical. That’s why a modernized contact center—measured by value-based benchmarks—is integral both for differentiating your healthcare organization and for preventing the loss of valuable customers.

For example, if a patient makes a basic inquiry, such as to schedule an appointment, ask a question about a treatment plan, or request a referral, are they confronted with a myriad of questions, outdated, legacy options, and poorly automated selection menus? Are they routed and rerouted among multiple call service operators and forced to relay the same information repeatedly? For a patient living in the gig economy and accustomed to a seamless customer experience, a painful interaction such as this isn’t likely to make a good first impression.

Contact centers measure quantitative benchmarks, such as how fast calls are answered, average handle time, the rate of first-call resolution, and the number of agent-to-agent transfers. All those measures are important, but these traditional, quantitative benchmarks fall short of the innovations and requirements of the industry’s transition to patient-centered, value-based care delivery.

Patient contact centers should offer seamless patient engagement, reducing frustration and time spent by caregivers and patients seeking answers to their questions. If airline carriers know their customers’ preferred seating arrangement and hotels know their guests’ floor and room preferences, then healthcare provider contact centers should strive to anticipate the needs of their patients in a much more proactive manner.

The shift toward an initiative-taking approach requires that patient records are in the patient portal and can be effectively routed to care coordinators. This allows agents to reference and make decisions based on what is known about that patient at that time, including personalization criteria, such as a patient’s preferred channel of communication.

Today’s consumers demand a healthcare ecosystem that offers self-service channels to help them get the right answer quickly. Provider organizations must invest in hyper-personalized, unified, and frictionless experiences with cross-channel integration to create a holistic and engaging patient experience. 

To support these modernized contact centers, health systems will turn increasingly to the next generation of data analytics and cognitive artificial intelligence (AI). Providers have a phenomenal amount of data at their disposal—from claims, labs, and other sources—but using it to effectively anticipate patient needs with razor-focused accuracy remains a challenge. 

From tracking and screening of biometrics and preventive care based on personalized data, organizations should deploy analytics to enhance personal profiles and gain a comprehensive understanding of how to best guide an individual’s health requirements. This will raise the bar on optimizing patient experience. 

As the industry continues to shift toward a patient-centric, proactive model, business process management (BPM) providers can assist with addressing these changes and shorten the learning curves that may exist. The fact that most BPMs have existing relationships with clients who have long emphasized customer experience, such as retail and e-tail, makes them the perfect resource to tap for providing guidance and implementing these new strategies.

Donna Martin is senior vice president, healthcare business development at HGS. 

By Greg Kefer

Your phone starts ringing, you drop what you’re doing, look at the screen, and see a call from some odd number from a faraway place. Or worse yet, it says “Scam Likely!” I’m rarely in the mood to listen to some foreign language robot or get rich pitch. Phone calls that matter have increasingly become the minority.

According to estimates, US mobile phone users were exposed to 48 billion robocalls in 2018, which means that every time the phone rings, there’s a 50 percent chance it’s a spam robocall.

Training the Masses to Decline Calls

There are few viable solutions available for blocking 100 percent of these annoying intrusions, so the best option when that unknown phone number shows on the caller ID is to simply hit the decline button and move on with whatever you were doing. Robocalls are creating anti-call center muscle memory across the entire mobile phone user population.

The shunning of annoying telemarketing cold calls is not a new thing. But thanks to robocall automation, the surge of incoming noise has become so intense, there’s little chance a consumer will pause and consider the possibility that an incoming call might actually matter. This is a problem for the healthcare industry.

Call centers have always been a big part of the healthcare patient experience. Challenges with being on hold, ineffective agents, and general customer dissatisfaction with call centers are well documented. But what about the outbound side?

The Challenge for Healthcare Call Centers

The healthcare industry is investing heavily in engaging patients, and call centers are a big piece of that strategy. Outbound calling campaigns help patients navigate their care, set appointments, take medicines, or check in after a visit. These are potentially important touch points. If people stop answering their phones, what happens? Email outreach is frequently intercepted by spam filters, secure messaging is clunky, and most patients don’t log into their healthcare portals.

At call centers, human capacity has always been a constraint. When it comes to dealing with healthcare situations, there have not been a lot of viable automation options that blend a quality, well-designed engagement experience with a high-scale system. Anybody that has received a robocall doctor’s appointment reminder knows how disengaging it is.

The healthcare industry faces a challenge when it comes to reaching out to patients, often for critical issues.

• Providers and pharma companies need to reach out and connect with patients.
• Most patients have a mobile phone and prefer to communicate through them.
• Robocalls have trained consumers to avoid answering their phones.
• Healthcare mobile apps are too clunky and remain unused.
• Consumers prefer text messaging.

Heavy investment in call center technology that’s focused on intelligent patient information and agent enablement is still key. But is there a new opportunity for call centers to reach out to patients as part of a patient engagement effort?

Conversational chatbots that interact with people in a way similar to text messaging are finding their way into many industries. What would happen if an interactive text front end, first touch was woven into the outbound call center approach? The bot could completely handle simple tasks, such as reminders and information gathering. Or it could start on some of the more advanced workflows, such as monitoring care progression or providing drug background information in advance of a human to human interaction.

As they stand today, call center agents are premium level expenses when compared to a well-designed chatbot that can run 24/7. Imagine a call center not constrained by human capacity.

If the virtual dimension of a modern patient engagement strategy requires outreach and interaction with vast populations of patients, the answer isn’t to hire more agents. Rather, you must find a way to make the agents you already have handle an increased volume, with conversational chatbots conversing and engaging patients across a spectrum of workflows. And the entire process would be in the medium that consumers increasingly prefer—text-based messaging.

With this chatbot technology, the odds of reaching someone and helping them with their care can only increase.

Greg Kefer is the CMO at LifeLink.