The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to re-imagine everything we do – and this was especially true for the healthcare industry. It reshaped how caregivers live, learn, work and care for the sick. A digital transformation is necessary to meet the needs of patients and enhance the healthcare customer experience.

At the center of this transformation is a meeting point for digital innovations and human interactions. These interactions are designed to meet patient and frontline worker/caregiver demands. The key to success is creating a strategy or orchestrating an experience to know what should be a call center agent interaction — and what doesn’t have to be.

Alleviating the Pressure for Healthcare Teams

Reducing the repetition of interactions for patients and healthcare frontline workers alleviates some stress so care teams can deliver critical services with empathy. This digital agility offloads patient efforts.

A good first step to do this is to create a digital solution to handle repetitive tasks you can easily automate, such as prescription refills, appointment reminders, referrals, delivery of lab results, and patient data and identity verification. This also includes more complex tasks like personalized nurse triage protocols. If designed properly, this automation also reduces patient frustrations.

Front-end teams don’t have to handle these tasks and it should be easy for the patient to complete their care plans. Ensuring that the digital experience is personalized, humanized and nonlinear (i.e., not cold and robotic or automated text messages) is a key differentiator.

It’s also critical to design digital experiences to include humans, where needed. Healthcare must embrace human interactions with a digital face and voice on many occasions — but still keep it real.

Delivering care to patients anywhere is also vital. A mobile, video-enabled telemedicine setup must be part of any healthcare provider strategy. Careful planning and execution are crucial in reducing pressures on hospitals, efficiently assigning healthcare resources and improving patient experiences.

Patient Care Experience Rehabilitation

The delivery of virtual services in healthcare has driven an historic increase in the need for cloud-based applications and the ability to access services, such as appointment scheduling and reminders via personal devices.

This also requires operational changes and a contact center solution that includes automation, a seamless omnichannel experience, predictive artificial intelligence (AI) routing and electronics health record (EHR) integration.

Underpinning this is an architecture that offers consistent and resilient operations within multiple regions, and adheres to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance or meets other necessary regulations. The architecture must also be open to allow service choices and a broader ecosystem of services.

Let’s look at a strategy you can take to improve the patient access experience with a cloud-based contact center platform.

  1. Allow care teams to focus on what matters most with automation and digital deflection

For routine tasks, automation offers patients efficient service and lightens the burden on your team, allowing them to focus on more complex interactions with patients. Create convenient self-service options for scheduling or canceling, paying a bill or getting directions to an appointment.

You can also automate some outbound communications with medical call center software, such as reminders of a scheduled appointment or notifications of a referral’s authorization status. Proactive communication is an important component in maintaining patients’ adherence to their care plan. For example, the day before lab work is scheduled, remind the patient how to prepare.

After a procedure, remind the patient to contact the provider if there are any problems. For digital channels, you can also include a link to more information in your patient information portal.

  1. Expand patient options with managed digital and voice channels

Patients want answers and information fast, and they increasingly rely on web messaging, mobile apps and online self-service options to connect. In today’s always-on world, many patients want interactions with their healthcare providers to be as easy as those with other industries. They want near-immediate service or responses and a fast resolution. In fact, according to the Genesys report “Healthcare’s Empathy Gap,” 51% of patients expect to see a provider within a week of scheduling an appointment.

Digital channels and self-service options offer more than convenience to patients. They also give providers the power to automate routine tasks and adjust quickly to the variability in demand associated with seasonal illnesses or even larger public health issues.

Plus, they can ensure access for both patients and communications staff during a pandemic, natural disaster or other widespread public health issue. When staff can respond to patients’ inquiries using mobile apps, messaging or phones — even when they’re not in the office — patients’ access to their providers continues without disruption.

The connection with your team is critical for patients, but it’s not just convenience that matters. It’s a personal connection.

Sometimes, patients prefer talking to a member of the care team, especially when they have a complex question or need to discuss a sensitive issue. This means that, despite the digital trend, the phone is still an important communication channel.

But phone trees and voicemail aren’t enough anymore. Healthcare call center software needs to be able to route calls based on the patient’s needs. Voice routing with natural language understanding can direct calls to the right resource.

  1. Optimize patient engagement with predictive AI routing

As the first point of contact with patients, healthcare contact centers play a critical role in triage. Effectively managing the patient journey depends on connecting the patient with the right resource. Sometimes, a virtual agent or self-service option is appropriate. Other times, a patient service representative or nurse is needed.

Your contact center team can learn to make good decisions about when to transfer a caller to a clinical resource. Natural language processing can help virtual agents to evaluate the patient’s intent and route them to the best resource. It can also spot key words and phrases, such as “chest pain,” and seamlessly transfer the patient to a nurse. If no nurses are available, the patient’s information can be added to a managed queue for a callback.

  1. Personalize the patient experience with EHR integration

Personalizing the patient experience is about more than patient satisfaction. It also drives both the care plan and the patient’s adherence to it. That requires context — having access to the right information at the right time.

When it comes to clinical details, that context comes from the electronic health record (EHR). And that means it’s critical to integrate the EHR with your HIPAA-compliant call center solution.

EHR integration enables more patient-centered communication. For example, by simply verifying the patient’s identity, an IVR system can pull up the patient’s vital information in real time, before the service representative takes the call. This makes the interaction more personalized and efficient.

EHR integrations can also make digital engagements more meaningful and effective. As a result, patients are even more likely to rely on digital channels — and that further reduces the burden on contact center staff.

Creating a Roadmap to Better Patient Experiences

To transform your patient experience, you’ll need a clear roadmap. Start by mapping your current patient access experience and compare it with a map of your ideal experience to find your gaps. It can be helpful to consult with a customer experience expert who’s knowledgeable about HIPAA call center software needs and who understands where technology is going.

  • Identify areas of the workflow where your team spends time doing things that could be automated.
  • Note any unmanaged time lapses that create delays in getting answers and information to patients.
  • Analyze your KPIs and pinpoint parts of the workflow you could change to improve performance.

As you fill out the details in your roadmap, flag the items you can accomplish in the short term that will provide patients with the fast, convenient communication options they increasingly expect. That’s your starting point.

The Connected Healthcare Journey

Providers must ensure they offer a connected health experience journey and customer service across all channels — voice and digital — and in all interactions. These seamless and connected care experiences across patient activation, patient access, care planning, treatment and discharge, as well as ongoing health monitoring, should be humanized, personalized and secure. This continuity of care is best made possible through shared, next-generation data and interoperable solutions.

Healthcare organizations need to understand and derive patient intent to drive predictive personalization, digital containment, meaningful interactions and next-best actions. In addition, providers must be prepared to drive continuous improvement.