By Nicole Limpert

One of the United States’ oldest pediatric hospitals, recently recognized by the News and World Report, and named one of Healthcare’s “Most Wired” for several years for their dedication to leading the way in children’s health through technology and innovative research, receives thousands of calls every day.

Calls from worried parents concerned about their child’s health to specialists looking to connect with other experts through the Physicians Priority Link. Managing all of these calls every hour of the day, 365 days a year, is the Customer Connections call center in the hospital’s Access Services Department.

Customer Connections handles 850,000 calls per year from people nationwide—with as many as 4,500 calls in one day. With only six or seven operators on the phones simultaneously, the Customer Connections call center must be highly efficient, organized, and accurate to route the calls to the right person immediately.

Call Center Software Is Key

This small but dedicated team handles several types of calls: general incoming calls to the hospital, direct-to-department calls, after-hours answering service, and physician-to-physician consults. They also manage contacting the Medical Response team.

Customer Connections has been using its communication software to handle these calls since 2006. “Our call center software does everything we need,” says the access services manager. “We haven’t found another platform that does everything. It’ll route your calls—plus you can do scripting. The flexibility of the system is the beauty of it. Whenever a department requests that we support them, we build a script. To me, the script is the best thing. It 100 percent keeps us from making errors.”

An individual operator averages 450 calls daily, with no two calls being the same. The organization uses its scripting software to automatically detect call flow and determine the scripting options based on the hospital’s protocols, ensuring that the correct information is gathered and communicated.

The Customer Connections team at this Midwest hospital regularly creates custom scripts for the many departments whose calls they handle. Scripts significantly reduce the time needed to train operators to answer and route calls for new departments. They also help operators manage tense situations, such as emergency calls, which helps the callers and operators feel more at ease and ensures that medical response teams receive sufficient information.

“We’ve got multiple departments that have departments within departments, and so the scripting can get quite involved, but it’s what saves us,” explains the manager. “We support so many departments and take so many different phone calls that there’s no way we could do this job accurately without the scripting.”

Agent Scripts Save Time and Reduce Errors

Accurate and easy-to-follow scripts are essential, with phone calls averaging 8-10 seconds. A staff member was hired and trained to build, write, and maintain the scripts. The team’s scriptwriter makes customized scripts for any type of call (even emergencies) in as little as 20 minutes by using the drag-and-drop scripting tool and easily edits phone numbers, doctors’ names, and any other custom information as requested by the departments.

Keeping these scripts up to date helps reduce operator errors, improves efficiency, ensures professional call handling, and provides accurate information.

The access services manager further states, “The script building is a lifesaver, and we do it all ourselves. Our script writer is the ‘who’s on-call’ guru for the hospital. He is what makes this department go.”

Remote Access

The Customer Connections team maintained its high call volume when the operators moved to work remotely from home. All the operators needed were phones, headset adapters, and computers loaded with the call center software.

They can sign in from anywhere and work remotely because the software enables any computer to act as a fully functioning, professional operator workstation, just as if they were working from the call center. They still reached all their goals for call-answering time, hold time, and other audit scores.

Physician Referral Capability

The ease with which the Customer Connections department handles the wide variety of calls—especially the Physicians Priority Link (PPL)—has captured the attention of other hospitals that want to implement a similar physician-to-physician referral line.

“I get a lot of calls from different hospitals asking about PPL, how we take the information, and what we do with it,” says the Access Services manager. “I’m always surprised when I realize their software doesn’t allow them to do the scripting and take messages.”

Customizable Scripts

Agent prompts, lookups, and navigation can be customized and built into database-driven call scripts that automatically guide operators through:

• Main number calls
• Patient and medical staff appointments
• Physician referrals
• Nurse triage
• Patient transport
• Code calls
• Paging
• Physician answering services
• Prescription renewals
• Scheduling
• Consultations
• Admissions
• Complex care calls
• Crises and emergencies
• Facility directions
• Messages for physicians, staff, and departments
• Patient satisfaction surveys

The look and function of the attendant console are also customizable, and various locations or departments can use assorted colors or layouts to reduce communication errors. Color-coding helps agents instantly identify call types, and time-of-day and day-of-week messaging and dispatching ensures the correct navigation script and dispatch options are displayed.

Conclusion

When a phone call is one of the first personal connections a patient makes with a hospital, the operator’s ability to handle the call professionally and accurately plays a prominent role in the patient experience. In support of this hospital’s vision to lead the nation in innovative technology and continued improvements in patient care, the Customer Connections department excels at answering and routing all calls correctly and efficiently. 

Nicole Limpert is the marketing content writer for 1Call, specializing in offering enterprise-wide communication solutions for healthcare organizations.

By Nicole Limpert

When you think of the most dangerous careers in the United States, it’s understandable to think of farmers, loggers, law enforcement, and construction workers. But would you consider adding nursing to that list?

Violence experienced by healthcare workers in the United States has been a major concern for years and unfortunately, it is getting worse. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published a fact sheet about workplace violence in healthcare between 2011-2018 that showed the industry’s workplace violence was on the rise. It found that “healthcare workers accounted for 73 percent of all nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses due to violence.”

A more recent survey from Perceptyx, an employee insight platform, found that over a 30-day period in early 2022, 92 percent of health workers experienced or witnessed workplace violence. It also reported that “Three in four (health workers) have also experienced verbal and physical assaults in the past month and almost half of them had to call security or a colleague to assist them.”

Understanding Healthcare Workplace Violence

According to research published in May 2022 by JAMA Network Open, patients and visitors were the most frequent source of violence towards healthcare staff. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) includes the following reasons as risk factors that contribute to violence in a healthcare setting:

• Working alone
• Lack of means of emergency communication
• Lack of training and policies for staff
• Under-staffing in general, and inadequate security staff
• Lifting, moving, and transporting patients
• Presence of firearms
• The perception that violence is tolerated, and reporting incidents will have no effect

There are numerous studies that show many incidents of violence are not reported by healthcare workers even though formal reporting processes are in place. Verbal abuse and bullying are especially prone to under-reporting.

Reasons for under-reporting include lack of faith in the reporting system, fear of retaliation, and because the people who have chosen healthcare as a career path feel they have an ethical duty to protect patients—even when the patients cause harm to their caregivers.

Include Contact Center Scripting in Emergency Action Plans

On June 1, 2022, a shooter opened fire in the Natalie Building, part of the Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The gunman was a patient who blamed his surgeon for pain following back surgery. He injured an unspecified number of bystanders and killed four people, including himself and three others who were hospital staff.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) states active shooter incidents are commonly over within 10 to 15 minutes. During the Saint Francis Hospital shooting, officers responded within three minutes when the initial call was received by 911. Their fast action undoubtedly saved more lives.

It is imperative that hospitals include their contact centers as part of their emergency action plan (EAP). According to the DHS, an effective EAP includes, “Contact information for, and responsibilities of individuals to be contacted,” and “an emergency notification system to alert various parties of an emergency.”

Handling calls quickly and correctly is of utmost importance. Scripting software can be customized to efficiently guide operators through scripts for any type of call, including emergency, crisis, and code calls. Contact center scripting software helps to streamline enterprise-wide hospital communications and processes by:

• Speeding up call processing
• Providing accurate information
• Reducing operator errors
• Improving efficiency and productivity
• Supplying detailed call analytics and reporting

Integrate Emergency Notifications with Secure Messaging

Every healthcare facility has unique security risks that can affect patients, visitors, and hospital staff. Most organizations have a security management plan that is designed to identify and manage security risks.

Security teams manage and mitigate risks they find on a hospital campus and are supported by local police departments. The security teams often work together with a hospital’s telecommunication center because hospital call center operators also handle calls for security assistance and can monitor emergency phones and other security technology at the hospital.

When a security team needs to communicate an alert to the staff of a hospital campus, it is common for the hospital’s call center operators to send the notification because their call center software contains a complete personnel directory.

Contact groups are built in advance, so notifications occur with one click. Seconds matter and so do the number of keystrokes it takes for them to send out emergency notifications to multiple contacts and devices.

An efficient way to communicate these alerts is via the secure messaging app employees use on their smart devices for work. Many hospitals have replaced their outdated pager technology with secure messaging apps to improve notification speeds and response times. These apps are used by providers, lab techs, building maintenance, environmental services, contact center, security, and other departments within an organization.

Notification systems can integrate with a hospital’s secure messaging app and use automated notifications to communicate critical alerts and security instructions to reach more people in less time.

Some apps can also track message activity, complete with message histories, indicating whom messages were sent to and when messages were read so an organization can have confidence in knowing critical messages were delivered and read.

According to OSHA, healthcare workplace violence is preventable when an effective program is in place. They cite five key program components:

• Management commitment and worker participation
• Worksite analysis and hazard identification
• Hazard prevention and control
• Safety and health training
• Record keeping and program evaluation

Technology used by a healthcare organization’s contact center should be included in a violence prevention program. As the hub of communication for a hospital system, their call center already has updated contact information for departments and employees and uses highly effective communication tools to get critical alerts to staff members.

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

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By Matt Everly

The call center in a healthcare organization preforms a number of very important and very different functions. One of the most significant is serving as a virtual lobby, when processing internal and external calls. It may be the initial touchpoint a patient has with the organization, so the experience has to be positive. As the saying goes, “You only have one opportunity to make a first impression.” Also the call center serves as the nerve center for ongoing communications.

Modern healthcare call centers need to be able to handle all types of calls quickly and efficiently. To ensure the virtual lobby experience is positive, the call center operators need immediate access to accurate data using modern technology. To accomplish this, information systems need to be able to share, pass, and store usable data from system to system. Interoperability is a term used in healthcare to describe the idea of different technologies and systems communicating to share data.

To handle calls effectively and efficiently, the call center system needs to use data that may reside in external databases on other systems. As an example, if a caller wants to talk to an admitted patient, the operator needs to know which room to send the call to. Most patient admission, discharge, and transfer (ADT) information resides in a database that is external to the call center system.

Without interoperability, the operator would have to bring up a second screen to view the ADT information, go back to the call center system screen, manually enter the room extension, and transfer the call. With interoperability the call center system would automatically download the ADT information from the external database and present it to the operator on the call center screen, eliminating several steps and decreasing the chance of error. Interoperability works behind the scenes to automate data exchanges and sharing.

Making sure the hospital call center is interoperable with other systems is the safe way to make sure call center operators communicate with callers in a timely and effective manner. A few of the important IT systems and technologies that should be interoperable with the healthcare call center system include:

• Electronic health records (EHR)
• Messaging applications (paging and secure messaging apps)
• Alarms and monitoring systems
• Nurse call systems
• Scheduling systems

Many healthcare call centers routinely use outdated technology. Binders with paper call schedules, non PC-based PBX consoles, fax machines, data access terminals, and sticky notes are used by operators to access the information they need to handle calls. These makeshift solutions lead to inefficiency and mistakes.

Interoperability Works Both Ways: Hospital call center systems store information as administrators and operators input data or create schedules. This information may be valuable to other departments or used to augment an external document.

As an example, when an operator takes a message from a patient for a clinician, that message can be automatically sent to the EHR system and be posted to that patient’s individual electronic health record. By using interoperability, information from numerous databases can be combined in one area to form a master record for a particular patient.

Not All Systems Allow Interoperability: Legacy systems and technologies were not designed with data exchange in mind. There are several ways to connect IT systems to the healthcare organization’s larger digital ecosystem, but these can be costly and potentially unreliable.

Health Level Seven (HL7) is a set of standards used to transfer clinical and administrative data between software applications. Many present-day IT developers design products with HL7 in mind, helping organizations move toward interoperability throughout the enterprise. The healthcare call center can use HL7 to populate patient, clinician, and employee directories for operators. Also HL7 can be used as a way to post information from the call center system to a patient’s EHR.

Reducing Costs: Interoperability will make your call center operators more efficient, eliminate mistakes, and reduce costs by automating processes that are currently handled manually. As healthcare providers look to reduce expenses, interoperability in the call center is a natural solution.

Matt Everly is the marketing director for Amtelco’s 1Call healthcare division. Matt has worked at Amtelco for over twenty years and has held numerous positions, including southeast regional sales manager, executive suite market development, and marketing manager.

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By Mia Papanicolaou

Healthcare call centers play a vital role in servicing patients, improving patient-practitioner communication, and leveraging operational efficiencies to contain healthcare costs. The steady digitization of patient records has brought about significant improvements in service efficiency and patient care. While inevitable, this digital transformation introduces new challenges associated with safely storing, processing, and sharing documents containing personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI).

The healthcare sector holds the unfortunate position of having the “highest number of data breach incidents compared to other industries.” Incidents such as the LA hospital ransom attack and the database breach at Anthem Inc prove that healthcare data presents an attractive target for cyber-criminals, allegedly fetching a ten to twenty times higher premium in the black market over commonly hacked credit card data.

Despite the risks, healthcare providers and their outsourced call centers are compelled to make documents easily accessible in order to provide quality customer service. In addition, patients themselves are demanding the ability to access their own records through channels such as email, web, and mobile apps.

However, moving to digital documentation should not pose an automatic risk of breaching highly confidential patient information. In fact, if implemented correctly, a digital document management solution offers significantly more security and control than traditional document management systems.

Patient documents need to be protected at all points in the digital journey, whether stored in a document repository, accessed at the call center, travelling via the Internet, or sitting on the patient’s own computer. This can be achieved using a combination of encryption technologies, password protection, access control, and education.

Here are five top tips for protecting patient documents:

Tip 1) Control access at the document level: A digital document management solution should offer multiple layers of access control that enable a healthcare call center to compartmentalize and restrict access to different patient documents. Agent clearance should dictate what functions staff can perform on a document: view, download, or share. As an example, certain private patient records can be password protected so that the only access within a call center is the ability to send the document to the patient when requested, rather than let the agent view the details of that document.

Tip 2) Provide ongoing agent education: The easiest way for criminals to breach security and access a repository of confidential documents is by tricking or compromising an employee. In a call center environment, which suffers from high employee turnover, this fear is compounded. Be sure all agents understand and operate by the security guidelines when it comes to accessing and sharing patient documents. Constantly reinforce that one should never click on links or open documents from an unknown source as this is a common method used to install malicious software that effectively puts the hackers inside the secure network.

Tip 3) Use multiple layers of protection: As cybercriminals continue to get smarter, traditional network and database security is not sufficient. To truly secure patient documents, multiple security layers are required, to the point of encrypting and protecting each individual document even if it resides on a secure network. This also ensures that information sent via email between a call center agent and patient cannot be compromised if intercepted or sent to the wrong recipient. It also protects the document               1) against unauthorized access from someone inside the network; 2) if a call center agent doesn’t have sufficient rights to view patient information; and 3) if a compromised employee or a hacker is using stolen, but valid, credentials.

Tip 4) Help patients secure their documents: Make it a policy to never send or store unprotected documents containing confidential information. An emailed or downloaded document is saved automatically on certain devices and if unprotected, it becomes vulnerable if the device is hacked. Assist patients with safeguarding their information even when it resides on their own computer by distributing only encrypted and protected files; train call center staff to let patients know the importance of this protection.

Tip 5) Enforce a strong password policy: In order to secure patient documents from all vulnerabilities, a strong password approach is essential. This applies to the password an agent uses to access internal systems, the one a patient uses to log onto a self-service portal, or even the password used to open an individual document. If the password is weak, all other security is bypassed. Educate agents and patients on the value of using only strong passwords and the risks of using easily cracked passwords such as “123456,” “abc123,” or “password.”

The demand for anytime, anywhere access may be patient driven, but digital transformation is highly beneficial for a healthcare call center seeking to boost efficiency, improve communication, and enhance the patient experience. By taking advantage of these simple security tips, a call center will not only be able to deliver a strong customer service experience, but also provide the technologies needed to safeguard their information.

Mia Papanicolaou is chief operations officer for document security specialist Striata Inc. Mia joined Striata in 2006 and having worked in Africa and the UK, now heads up North, Central, and South American operations. Striata provides strategy, software and professional services that enable digital communication across multiple channels and devices. Striata technology secures, sends, and stores confidential documents.

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By Detta Donoghue

Many would first say hospitals, while others might say their primary care physician, and still others might think of the local clinic they depend on. Clearly all of these are appropriate responses, depending on the health status of the individual answering the question. Even though each of these function differently, there is one common thread that links them all: patient care. Today hospitals, group practices, and clinics are in a competitive environment, at times fighting (in a civilized way, of course) to gain the attention of new patients.

Securing new patients, however, is just the beginning. More than ever healthcare organizations are looking at technology to help them keep and retain their clientele. For example, the patient portal, unheard of five years ago, is now a standard and has made its way into private practices, dental organizations, and even veterinary medicine. Yes, you can now track Fido’s health online.

So why would any organization jeopardize all this progress and not do everything possible to make sure the patient shows up at the appointed time? I’m speaking of the standard the appointment reminder message we all get today. These messages are not just for healthcare anymore, but have become a standard business practice where applicable. I personally receive them for hair appointments, restaurant reservations, and most recently for a hotel and tour reservation.

Clearly nobody wants to lose the revenue generated from missed appointments, lose the potential downstream revenue that appointments can generate, or let resources go unused for the appointed time slots from missed appointments. Studies show that as much as $20,000 can be lost when a patient does not keep a healthcare appointment.

This happened to me recently when I failed to show up for tests that had been scheduled. Why didn’t I show up? Simple: I didn’t get the appointment reminder. To make the situation worse, when I asked why I did not receive the reminder – no call, no text, no email – I was told that the information was on my patient portal. There was just one problem: I had not signed up for the portal; I didn’t even know the practice had one. So the tests had to be rescheduled. Luckily the results were good – it could have easily gone the other way, and waiting almost a month for potentially lifesaving treatment would have been due to not receiving an appointment reminder.

The point of this little story is simple: Don’t lose sight of your audience. I’m pretty technically savvy, and I never thought to ask about the patient portal. Frankly, even if I had, I wouldn’t have thought it would replace the function of an appointment reminder.

If your organization is encouraging the use of a patient portal, be proactive in making sure your patients know how to use it. Next, if you have something that’s working well, make sure your new technology takes your facility or practice to the next level of patient care without any loss of service. Finally, when deploying new technology, ask what can or cannot be integrated with what you already have in use currently. Often you can leverage what you have already invested in by adding other levels of service and solutions.

Don’t let technology get in the way of serving patients. Don’t overlook something as simple as an appointment reminder. Your patients’ health is at stake – along with lost billing.

Detta Donoghue has been working in the technology industry for over forty years, holding a variety of positions servicing the IT and telecom disciplines. As the director of marketing and communications for CI, Detta provides branding, collateral, presentation, and educational support for both the channel sales group and company as a whole. Detta was formerly the director of marketing and vendor relations for SDC, director of channel sales for Amcom, served on Avaya’s DevConnect committee, and was president of the Siemens user group.

[From AnswerStat – October/November 2015]