Delivering high-quality patient care isn’t just about clinical expertise — it requires a seamless communication strategy that connects patients, care teams and critical health information. Without it, patient access suffers, care coordination becomes fragmented and outcomes can decline.

To drive better patient experiences and quality outcomes, healthcare organizations should integrate their communications, leveraging an enterprise Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) platform with their electronic health record (EHR) system — to help ensure that the right information is available at the right time, every time.

Why Your CCaaS Engagement Platform Must Integrate with Your EHR

EHRs are the source of truth for your patients’ information. To truly drive meaningful conversations between patients and care teams, your communications platform can only provide context if the two are integrated together.

The rapid adoption of AI is redefining how the healthcare industry delivers safe, secure and seamless patient experiences. Health systems can better connect patient engagement and clinical data across systems and departments through a native integration between their cloud contact center platform and EHR system.

What to Look for in a Healthcare Contact Center Platform

Today, patients often navigate over 10 communication touchpoints before reaching a resolution, and yet patients expect seamless, connected healthcare experiences. Achieving this starts with an engagement platform that reduces effort on the patient and their caregivers throughout their journey to improve quality of care and overall health outcomes. 

But the healthcare industry is facing a significant workforce challenge. The care team must have tools that ensure they can best support patients. Workflows are complex – and they require communications tools that can drive automation, reduce communication tag, and better support the care team when engaging with patients.

By embracing innovation through an enterprise CCaaS platform integrated with their EHR system, health systems are empowered to streamline communication — and ultimately drive better, more connected patient journeys.

Native Integration with Your EHR

Delivering seamless communication experiences helps reduce patient effort, build loyalty and drive care plan adherence. By leveraging an API-first open platform, you can integrate seamlessly into your EHR to deliver context-rich experiences through the automation of patient access, revenue cycle and pharmacy workflows. A native integration should also support outbound work queue management, such as managing referrals, care gaps and more.

When your system of engagement and system of record are deeply integrated, you can help ensure patients receive safe, secure and personalized support throughout their care journeys through:

  1. Seamless patient engagement with AI-routing to get patients to the right digital, operational or clinical resource.
  2. Automation of repetitive tasks to reduce patient effort and improve consistency in documentation.
  3. Omnichannel communication to empower patients to communicate on their preferred channels.
  4. Integration of communication capabilities directly inside of your EHR.
  5. Realtime knowledge surfacing through a real-time engagement and CRM creation so that all staff can see the patient journey.
  6. HIPAA compliance with secure patient data management.

Comprehensive AI and Automation

When evaluating healthcare contact center platforms, look for a solution that improves both patient and care team experiences. The right platform should provide personalized routing across all channels, supporting efficient and effective care journeys. A health system can leverage native AI capabilities to automate routine patient engagement tasks such as appointment scheduling, billing and outreach.

With capabilities such as agent copilots, health systems can surface real-time knowledge to their care teams, including practice protocols, on-call instructions and more. An AI-powered contact center platform can also listen for key phrases and prompt targeted screening questions. This enables non-clinical staff to escalate at-risk patients to the appropriate clinical resource.

Built-In Outbound Solutions

Driving proactive outbound communication enables health systems to better understand and address patient intent. When health systems recognize a patient’s need, and their contact center platform integrates with EHR work queues, they can deliver personalized outreach to help patients stay on track with their care plans. Platforms that require third-party services for outbound engagements can quickly become costly and difficult to manage.

A CCaaS platform that’s built with native outbound solutions lessens the burden on your care team to manually manage, and play tag with the patient, when a care team member is required, for the management of referrals, orders, post-discharge follow-ups, care gaps and more.

Workforce Engagement Management

When you care for your care team, they in turn can care for your patients. But health systems often face high turnover and narrow operating margins. Workforce engagement management (WEM) can help address these challenges, including staff churn and burnout, while improving care delivery.

By leveraging a platform with a comprehensive WEM suite – including gamification, forecasting and scheduling, quality assurance training and more — you can equip staff with the right knowledge at the right time. This approach keeps them engaged and productive, eases workloads and improves resource distribution. These enhancements not only enhance your team’s experience but also drive improvements in patient experiences and outcomes. 

Proven Reliability and Uptime

Service interruptions in any industry can create frustration for employees and end users alike. But service interruptions in a healthcare contact center platform can be detrimental. Health systems should look for a platform with robust infrastructure and proactive maintenance strategies with minimal downtime and uninterrupted service.

Guaranteed availability is essential to delivering patient care. In the event of a failure, you need a platform that can recover on its own without service disruption or data loss.

Genesys is committed to delivering reliable solutions, so you can deliver consistent and dependable service – and your patients can get access to the care they need, when they need it most.

Enhance Experiences with Health CX from Genesys, Integrated with Epic

A contact center platform that natively integrates with an EHR system allows care providers to personalize communications, minimize manual processes and leverage AI-driven tools to improve efficiency. Last year, Genesys announced its collaboration with Epic to deliver stronger, more connected patient journeys. Here’s how Health CX from Genesys integrated through Epic Workshop can enhance patient and care team experiences: can enhance patient and care team experiences:

  • Streamlined patient engagement: Automate appointment reminders, scheduling, billing and follow-ups for more streamlined patient experiences. When patients are ready to progress through their care journey, AI-powered routing connects them to the right resource based on intent.
  • Enhanced staff productivity: Reduce time spent on manual workflows, allowing staff to focus on tasks that impact patient care. After each interaction, Health CX provides a comprehensive interaction summary – helping to improve care quality and reducing your staff’s time spent on documentation.
  • AI-driven efficiency: Built with generative AI capabilities, Health CX can deliver real-time call summaries and documentation, reducing your staff’s after-call work. Additionally, when a patient calls in for help, staff can quickly verify their identity, so your care teams know who they’re speaking to throughout every interaction.
  • Omnichannel communication: Creating patient-centric experiences is key to meeting patient preferences and improving care efficiency. Health CX powers seamless communication across channels, including voice, text, email and more. This allows care teams to communicate with patients at the right time – on the channel patients prefer.
  • Operational simplicity: Simplified workflows support better experiences for patients and care teams. When Epic is integrated as the system of record with the Genesys Cloud™ platform, you can unlock real-time updates and access to patient information to reduce manual, inefficient work.

Watch this webinar to discover how you can deliver connected patient journeys by integrating your contact center platform with a robust EHR system.

* Epic is a registered trademark of Epic Systems Corporation.