LVM Systems Releases LVM One v1.5 

LVM Systems announces the release of version 1.5 of its flagship LVM One healthcare contact center solution. For the past thirty-four years, LVM has served the healthcare contact center industry, establishing a reputation for quality software, robust functionality, unwavering customer support, and industry-leading product customization.

LVM offers healthcare organizations an installable desktop solution, a web-deployable Web application, and an option to either host the software on LVM’s Virtual Call Center (VCC) running on Azure or directly on a locally hosted Azure network.

The desktop version offers many options for system administrators to customize the software. In addition, development customizations are available to meet unique client requests to address organization-specific business opportunities. Using the web version provides a lightweight, secure, and convenient way to handle many day-to-day contact center activities using customizable, unique workflows.

The desktop and web versions enable staff to monitor their active calls and follow-up queues, pull system reports, and report on valuable contact center information. LVM’s solutions support both clinical and marketing functions.

Clinical functions supported include nurse triage, patient transfer, behavioral health intake & assessment, population health, disease management, care coordination, and post discharge follow-up. Below are descriptions of two solutions LVM offers as part of the integrated solution or as stand-alone products.

Patient Transfer

LVM’s Patient Transfer solution allows organizations to manage the activities and communications critical to this patient acquisition function. The LVM Patient Transfer function supports improved call flow while tracking numerous customizable data points. It also enables staff to streamline and track the sequence of communications needed to find available physicians, locations (hospitals, rooms, beds), and transportation services.

The Patient Transfer solution enables staff to send direct messages to each other using an optional component. It also provides real-time, multi-user updates (timestamped with any updates or changes), management oversite and approval, and detailed transfer reporting. In addition, the LVM Patient Transfer solution enables transfer centers to track the transfer workflow from start to finish. LVM’s Communication Portal facilitates real-time conversations between the sending facility, transport company, and receiving facility. Organizations can run it as part of LVM’s multi-function, integrated solution or as a stand-alone solution.

Behavioral Health Intake & Assessment

LVM also offers a Behavioral Health Intake & Assessment solution. This solution tracks all aspects of the intake process, from services requested, to providers involved, to assessments needed. It provides a comprehensive blueprint of data points used during an intake call. In addition, LVM’s solution allows organizations to customize and fine-tune the workflow to meet their specific needs.

All data recorded, including insurance and all contacts associated with an intake and admit/discharge, is stored in reportable fields. Capturing the data ensures the complete intake process is documented and reportable in any way needed. Organizations can also interface the transaction’s history with their EMR. Like the Patient Transfer Communication Portal, LVM’s Behavioral Health Intake & Assessment can run as part of the overall LVM solution or as a stand-alone product.

Other Solutions

In addition, LVM supports marketing functions such as Data-Driven Relationship Management, Physician Referral and Appointment, Marketing Outreach, Feedback Management, Answering Service, Class Registration, Service Lines, Web Self Service, Smart Surveys, Interactive Chat, Data Integrations via Smart HL7, Ad-Hoc Analytics, and many other interactional functions.

Integrations

The integration capabilities of LVM’s solutions allow them to ingest multiple sources of data to utilize when interacting with customers. For example, through bidirectional integration, LVM can push/pull data to/from other systems using HL7. Doing this enables the systems to share information across the organization. For example, sharing data among all systems in a hospital informs each department of the complete patient experience as they communicate with the patient.

Health systems must provide a contact center solution that utilizes multiple channels to deliver accurate answers and quick responsiveness. LVM uses multiple tools to improve interoperability, reducing customer and contact center efforts to access knowledgeable responses for all inbound inquiries, outgoing communication, and coordination assistance.

Surveys

Surveys are a critical tool in healthcare today. LVM solutions include customizable surveys for use in feedback management, behavioral health intake, patient transfer, population health, disease management, and care coordination.

Contact center staff can also use surveys post-discharge to validate patient follow-up, as follow-up on physician referrals, or to assess class satisfaction. The information gained allows for rapid course correction and problem mitigation.

Staff Supports

LVM’s solutions include customized workflows with guided scripts. New staff quickly become more efficient when using workflows, thus reducing their stress, errors, and call times. Using workflows also increases completed call counts while enhancing the caller’s experience.

The point-and-click documentation saves staff time, reduces errors, and lessens staff fatigue, freeing staff up for more critical interactions. Other efficiency tools include type-ahead tables and rapid notes.

In addition, LVM leverages critical efficiencies throughthe following capabilities.

Single Sign-on: With single sign-on, users more quickly access the LVM solutions while adding a layer of security. Single sign-on allows users to maintain their single secure user and password without creating and remembering a new user and password, seamlessly authenticating to the LVM software.

Speech-to-Text: Using LVM, nurses can populate their call notes into the patient’s call record by voicing them. No more need to manually enter them. Doing this reduces call time and errors.

Call Templates: When a disaster or a pandemic hits, healthcare organizations need an easy way to create workflows that include specific physicians, facilities, surveys, classes, and other specific resources. LVM’s Call Templates enable contact centers to pre-define these resources. Contact center staff can also use Call Templates in support of marketing campaigns to organize similar calls into different categories or in support of specific service lines.

Dashboards: LVM’s solution includes Real-time Command Center Dashboards to support contact center efficiency. Dashboard reports provide the ability to compile aggregate data from multiple systems into a single report.

Data sources can include data from various contact center solution modules, internal and external databases, and data from the phone system, to name a few. They represent an overview of multiple individual reports when presented as dashboard reports. The design aesthetics can suit each organization’s needs. Organizations can design graphs, legends, and layouts to address specific organizational needs.

Custom Reporting: In addition to the existing reports on current and historical data, LVM provides tools to create custom reports for export to Excel or other applications. All fields are reportable without exception. Clients can also run reports on trending, such as average call times, most commonly used protocols, performance evaluation reports, QI audit reports, frequent callers, and the number of calls by guideline. Additional reports include redirection of care, calls by insurance, ROI reporting, dashboard reporting, and many more.

Discovery Reporting: LVM Report Discoveries (Ad-Hoc Reports) allow contact centers to identify and select fields to pull into custom reports. Discoveries allow reporting data for a given period and comparing period over period.

This tool enables contact center managers to create reports within an intuitive interface that does not require SQL or other programming-type knowledge. After completing a report, save it, add it to favorites, create it as a PDF, export data to Excel, or send it via email. Year-over-year reporting is also available with any criteria and report automation.

Usage Stats: Usage Statistics allows clients to send anonymous data to LVM. This data is then available to participating clients to see trends across all participating clients in various geographic areas with different workflows and staffing models. LVM encourages all clients to turn this feature on and take advantage of the aggregate reporting that Usage Statistics offers. Participating clients can run these reports with different date ranges to see trends, selecting the specific data to compare.

Security Initiatives: Today, contact centers face the ever-increasing dangers of hackers attempting to access patient data. As a result, LVM has taken measures to strengthen its security posture, including investing in a third-party security audit. In addition, LVM completed a 2022 (SOC) 2 Type 2 with HITRUST Mappings Examination to help ensure contact center data remains safe.

Microsoft Gold Partner

For the past sixteen years, LVM has been a Microsoft Gold Partner. Microsoft confirmed the value of LVM through client satisfaction surveys on which LVM scored above average. In addition, working with LVM provides clients the security of knowing both the software and the developers who create it meet the high standards they expect.

Conclusion

Collaborating with a healthcare contact center company that understands the importance of security and can customize its system to address the needs of the organization’s different audiences is critical in today’s consumer-focused world. Whether it is additional data elements to capture and report on or unique workflows to fit the callers’ needs, today, more than ever, healthcare organizations need a customizable system to drive patient encounters.

With over three decades of serving this industry, LVM Systems has the tools, knowledge, and experience to assist healthcare organizations in meeting these needs.

By Bob Kobek and Michael W. Hill

The patient experience (PX) journey all starts here, right here. The opportunity to establish trust and begin the patient journey with them starts at the contact center, the point of the spear. It’s the first step in a patient’s journey with your healthcare organization. It’s the first voice, the expediter, the listener, the innovator, the loyalty builder, and the expectation setter for the rest of the journey.

This is where measuring to manage your internal ecosystem begins, taking you from the first touch point through to the Customer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) survey, if needed.

The practice of measuring to manage is simplest when you incorporate it as a matter of process in your healthcare call center. The contact center is by far the most accountable product or service deliverable.

Every event in the log in time of your agents is accounted for. Given today’s automation, everything you do—whether it be full-tilt call center management to your customer relationship management system—should be designed to measure and report.

Let’s start with the agent disposition of a call. The internal measurement tools are sophisticated. You have the ease of reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs) that are all instigated from the first incidence of an agent hearing a dial tone. The good old dials, contacts, completes (DCC), leads per hour (LPH), and sales per hour (SPH) will never go away. They’re still the best measure of the hourly outbound performance of your center.

Average speed per answer (ASPA), number of calls taken per hour, number of calls per resolution, and customer effort score (CES) are a few standard measurements for your inbound center.

These are important metrics. They establish benchmarks and performance. Some are even meant to do a better job of managing the process. The best call centers use some of that data to gamify the performance.

But, what about the people?

There are two areas of management measurement that typical contact center software does not address: patient experience (PX) and employee experience (EX). These relate to contact center performance, which are both related to your Medicare reimbursement score via the CAHPS survey.

Mobius Vendor Partners has launched a new product, Patients-Count®, entirely aimed at measuring and improving patient and employee experience to help you meet your strategic goals.

Let’s break the measurement of customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) down, with the understanding that they relate to patient experience (PX).

Patient Experience (PX)

You can use a typical set of questions to measure the impact of each patient contact with an omni contact center agent, whether inbound or outbound. These questions measure the key performance indicators (KPIs) of most agents—as a group and individually—through the lens of the patient.

If those patients have an affinity toward their experience—be it good, bad or indifferent—you can expect a response rate as high as 40 percent. A minimum response rate should be 10 percent, which is still enough to deliver actionable data.

Here are some KPIs to consider and remember. These are measured from the voice of the customer (VOC):

• friendliness
• innovation
• knowledge
• courtesy
• listening skill
• solution

All these KPIs can reflect a relationship between agent disposition and patient experience.

One question with some variation, is particularly relatable between the agent and the patient: the customer effort score (CES) and the employee effort score.

For example, “ABC made it easy for me to handle my issue” is directly relatable to the supervisor score. Another is “My supervisor helps me perform to the best of my ability.”

Both are on a 7-point scale, relatable, and can inform strategies to help you improve both patient and employee experience at the same time.

Employee Experience (EX)

Satisfied, engaged employees make sure their customers are satisfied. To measure the employee experience, your organization should survey employees in those areas that relate to their overall performance about their job responsibilities.

A good example is measuring the statement, “My supervisor helps me perform to the best of my ability.”

Let’s look at some sample results. Over half (21 out of 36) of employees surveyed don’t “strongly agree” that their manager helps them perform to the best of their ability.

These are common results, in which supervisors aren’t taking the time to work with their employees to help them perform at their best. So, what can a company do with this information?

First, ask the employees more questions about what areas of their job they could use support or guidance in. Then plans can be put in place to give the employees the requested training or support.

After that is implemented, survey the employees again in three to six months to see if there has been an improvement in the score.

Mobius Vendor Partners sees a direct correlation between the willingness of employees to help their customers have a positive experience and employees having a positive experience when their supervisor helps them perform at their best. Employees that receive help are then employees who will help others. That in turn increases contact center productivity.

Specific questions about the KPIs (friendliness, innovation, knowledge, courtesy, listening skill, and solution) that are of interest to you and your employees can be developed for your call-center personnel.

Bob Kobek (bobkobek@mobiusvp.com) is president of Mobius VP, LLC, and Patients-Count. Michael W. Hill (mikehill@mobiusvp.com), is senior employee experience consultant at Mobius VP, LLC, and Patients-Count.

Consider reaching out to www.Patients-Count.com, a professional firm specializing in surveying to help your company improve the performance of your employees and enhance the patient journey, simultaneously.

By Nicole Limpert

George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” This is especially true in the healthcare sector. Unfortunately, ineffective diagnostic communication can have dire consequences for patients. It is estimated that there are 40,000–80,000 deaths in the United States each year due to diagnostic error. Poor communication of laboratory test results is a contributing factor in these errors.

Critical laboratory results, also known as panic results or values, are defined as test results that exceed established high or low limits. Abnormal results are different from critical values. “Abnormal” and “critical” are not used interchangeably.

Critical results are considered life threatening and require corrective action to be taken promptly. After the critical laboratory results has been verified and entered into the lab’s computer system, notifications are sent to the patient’s physician and/or physician’s representative, the ordering entity, and any other clinical personnel responsible for the patient’s care.

Critical Results Reporting Standards

According to the “National Patient Safety Goals” set by The Joint Commission, timely reporting of critical results need to be made to the responsible licensed caregiver(s) within an established time frame so that the patient can be promptly treated.

They outline three elements of performance to achieve this goal:

1. Collaborate with organization leaders to develop written procedures for managing the critical results of tests and diagnostic procedures that address the following:

• The definition of critical results of tests and diagnostic procedures.
• By whom and to whom critical results of tests and diagnostic procedures are reported.
• The acceptable length of time between the availability and reporting of critical results of tests and diagnostic procedures.

2. Implement the procedures for managing the critical results of tests and diagnostic procedures.

3. Evaluate the timeliness of reporting the critical results of tests and diagnostic procedures.

Critical Lab Communication

When a critical lab value is verified, often a phone call is made to report the result and it is documented in the laboratory information system. To comply with patient safety goals, the person taking the call must read back the patient’s name, the hospital number, and all laboratory results. Read back is required to ensure accurate transmission of information.

Historically, verbal communication has been considered the preferred procedure for notifying critical values. However, the need to communicate lab diagnostics quickly and accurately is paramount for lowering the risk of a patient experiencing an adverse medical event.

An article in the National Library of Medicine titled “Critical Laboratory Values Communication: Summary Recommendations from Available Guidelines” finds that “The results of surveys conducted in the UK, Italy, US, China, and Croatia have notably emphasized that there is poor consensus regarding many aspects of critical values management. This is a concerning issue, for not less than three good reasons.

“First, the lack or delayed communication of critical values has been clearly recognized as a source of significant harm to the patients, since these test results may lead to treatment modification in as many as 98 percent of patients admitted to surgical wards and up to 91 percent of those admitted to medical departments.

“Then, critical values communication is an integral part of many accreditation procedures for medical laboratories, including the universally agreed International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

“Finally, timely notification of critical values has been endorsed as one of the leading quality indicators of the post-analytical phase [of laboratory medicine] by the Working Group ‘Laboratory Errors and Patient Safety’ (WG-LEPS) of the International Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (IFCC).”

Information technology tools are becoming an essential component of medical lab communication because they provide:

• Fast and accurate communications
• Automated systems
• Reporting
• Simplified communications
• HIPAA compliance to protect patient health information

The Traditional Process of Reporting Critical Values

The College of American Pathologists (CAP) offers a laboratory accreditation program. To attain accreditation through the CAP, they require that at least 90 percent of critical values be reported within 30 minutes after obtaining a verified result. A similar requirement is in place through The Joint Commission.

Sometimes it is difficult for organizations to attain or retain accreditation because the traditional process to verify and document notifications (read back) can be time consuming. Typically, institutions will designate categories of personnel who are authorized to receive critical values, usually physicians and nurses.

If the critical laboratory results are communicated to a suitable medical staff member, the name of that person, time of contact, and documentation of read back is recorded. If the result is provided to non-medical personnel, that person is required to notify the correct physician, record the notification, and read back in the patient’s medical record.

If the non-medical personnel are unsuccessful in contacting an appropriate person for transmission, the next step is often to page the provider. Significant delays can result if there are issues with contacting the provider or using precious time to find out who is on-call.

The Benefits of Using a Secure Messaging App

Secure messaging apps can outperform traditional phone calls by improving timeliness when reporting critical laboratory results. When healthcare organizations change their process of reporting critical values by telephone to using a secure messaging app instead, they can meet or exceed the standards put forth by accrediting agencies, experience increased efficiency by immediately getting the results to the right person, see a reduction in the time it takes to report results, and have a reliable record of the communication because messages are automatically time-stamped when sent, received, and read. Built-in reporting features provide accurate information about the communication process.

A secure mobile messaging app also provides:

• End-to-end message encryption to protect electronic patient health information and ensure all communications are secure and protected
• Freedom from outdated pagers. Devices can be consolidated through secure messaging apps so that all correspondence can be done from a smartphone, tablet, laptop, smartwatch, or desktop computer
• Ease of use
• Customization
• The ability to send massive amounts of data quickly and accurately while keeping users connected through WiFi and cellular networks
• Voice-to-text modes so users can speak a message into their device, and it automatically converts into text
• Persistent alert settings ensure important messages won’t be missed
• A message log to keep track of messaging histories
• Interoperability by having the ability to seamlessly integrate with on-call scheduling
• Safety features such as bio-metric access and remote disabling if a device is lost or stolen

Notification of critical laboratory results is a crucial function of the clinical laboratory. Using technology such as secure messaging, ensures information is received by the correct personnel, quickly and accurately, to help improve patient care.

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

Pulsar360, Inc. is a Colorado-based company, with origins dating back to 2001. It’s one of the oldest VoIP service companies in the United States and Canada and an early proponent of cloud technology for the communications industry. Today, as an established unified-communication-as-a-service (UCaaS) provider, Pulsar360 delivers a comprehensive set of offerings including:

• a cloud-based enterprise class IP PBX,
• premise-based IP PBX,
• session initiation protocol (SIP) trunking,
• business continuity disaster recovery solutions,
• T.38 faxing that meets HIPAA, GLBA, and other industry compliance regulations, and
• carrier services.

Unparalleled Experience and Expertise

Pulsar360’s top-notch leadership team has years of experience serving the telecommunication needs of business customers, as well as building and managing enterprises of significant scale in the telecommunications industry. They understand that long-term customer relationships are earned, and customers will not be acquired and retained based on price and technology alone.

They require their team and their authorized partners to spend the appropriate time upfront to validate the integrity of the customers’ network. This is followed by a consultative sales process to develop customized solutions for their clients, as opposed to selling a packaged solution.

Once awarded the business, an in-depth implementation process is used to guarantee that design and features meet the customer’s requirements and expectations. The resulting smooth transition to the new services, responsive communication, and resolution of issues are paramount in establishing these long-term relationships.

As an employee-owned company, everyone has a personal stake in customer satisfaction and the company’s success. One testament to their customer satisfaction is that an outside industry consultancy (Franklin Court Partners) reported that Pulsar360 has the lowest attrition rate in the industry. They’re continually focused on providing an excellent customer experience, as well as expanding and enhancing their suite of service offerings.

99.99 Percent Reliability

Pulsar360 is one of a handful of providers with facilities and networks in both the United States and Canada. They have been perfecting their platform and network for over seventeen years. Their operating platforms are some of the most advanced in North America.

They currently operate four data centers (three in the US and one in Canada), each with redundant infrastructure for all their service offerings. In addition, they have a presence in five additional geographically dispersed data centers.

Pulsar360 provides services to hundreds of call centers and telephone answering service customers. Understanding the special requirements of this industry, they have made a significant investment in their network infrastructure and solutions.

National Network Redundancy

Each Pulsar360 datacenter has connectivity to several national networks. If there is a problem with quality or service issues with one network, calls route to another. With tier II access, Pulsar360 can re-route customer traffic away from regional carrier issues.

Trunk Redundancy

They provision each SIP trunk to two of their geographically dispersed data centers. If there is a data center issue, carrier issue at the data center, or other problem, the other data center takes over for all trunks and DIDs associated with those trunks.

Trunk Bursting

Pulsar360 provides 20 percent burstable trunking to call center and answering service clients at no additional charge. This can be adjusted even higher on the fly for seasonal needs.

Toll-Free Number Redundancy

All toll-free numbers are provisioned with two national carriers. In the event of a major failure at one carrier, all the customer’s toll-free numbers are directed to the secondary carrier.

Customer Administration Portal

This feature provides instant activation of DIDs and toll-free numbers, administrative management for all services and features, and multiple reports.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Solutions

Pulsar360 provides several automatic failover alternatives, from simple automatic failover to secondary and tertiary internet connections, to automatic failover to a hot stand-by cloud business continuity and disaster recovery system.

If the customer’s premise or cloud system goes down, calls automatically failover and are delivered directly to operator desktops via softphones. Calling party ID and customer name or account number are delivered to the operator. It also includes a cloud-based IVR with multiple call queues, skills-based routing, and more when in failover mode. These options are flexible and customizable based on the customer’s unique requirements.

Quality of Service

With Pulsar’s SD-WAN offering they can provide quality of service (QoS) over the internet to their data centers. This—coupled with their 24/7 internet quality of service monitoring and issue alerting that includes scheduled VoIP quality tests with archived test results—insures they deliver the reliability to meet and exceed their customer’s expectations.

Carrier Partnerships

Pulsar360 has wholesale arrangements with numerous global carriers and competitive local exchange carriers. In addition to offering competitive rates and to alleviate finger pointing, the network services can be in Pulsar360’s name. They will receive issue notification by their circuit monitoring and will interact directly with carriers. They also interact directly with the customer’s system provider on issues. This provides one point of responsibility for their customers.

Over the years Pulsar360 has received numerous awards and recognitions. They recently received the 2020 Internet Telephony “Product of the Year Award” and the “Hosted VoIP Excellence Award” before that. They were also named a “Top 10 Cloud Communications Company” by Cloud Technology Insights.