When time is tight and resource is thin, technology so often steps up to the plate.
Automation is a fine example.
Communicating a message; sharing information; answering a question: in today’s always-on world, these are 24/7 activities.
Consumer demand far outstrips organizations’ abilities to assign a human agent to all of those interactions.
In many vertical sectors, the sheer volume of day-to-day operational communications required is simply too great.
In others, the mundane (albeit essential) nature of the communication fails to justify the resultant drain on what is often an already-stretched human workforce.
Healthcare is a potent example.
Doctors, nurses, and clinicians of every kind are the most valuable human resource there is.
And yet, in many cases, their time is taken up communicating with patients rather than treating them.
Setting appointments, sending reminders, reporting test results, issuing prescriptions, chasing ‘no shows’.
Mundane-yet-essential – perfect for an automated approach.
“To have someone manually call a patient costs as much as $3 a call; an automated call can cost as little as $0.16 – that’s pretty simple math,” says Byron Yu, Vice President of Healthcare Solutions at global enterprise-class contact center and IVR provider ComputerTalk, whose ‘ice’ communications platform is transforming the sector.
“However, the financials are just one compelling benefit. The time automation gives back to clinicians to focus fully on caring for patients is also hugely significant.
“There are many reasons why hospitals need to proactively communicate with patients and we know that many of those communications can be delivered automatically without compromising standards of care.
“The efficiencies that then flow from that approach are truly transformative; saving money, better-leveraging human resources, and, ultimately, improving patient outcomes.”
In Computer Talk’s case, its ‘ice’ contact center solution can be configured in myriad ways to address multiple use cases.
It can call patients simply to impart information and it can ask patients questions which then inform and support next-step pathways and actions.
“The obvious and main use case is communicating appointment reminders, but it extends far beyond that to things like processing cancellations or issuing vital public health messages about seasonal disease outbreaks and vaccinations,” says Yu.
“Before automation, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic for example, a certified nurse had to reach out and call patients to confirm they didn’t have symptoms or that they hadn’t travelled in the last 14 days.
“Now, for a specific campaign, we can call patients automatically, ask them a series of questions, automatically capture and process their responses and, depending on the answers, play them a message which provides information on what they should do next.
“A report is then automatically generated to let clinicians know which of the 2,000 people the hospital may have called that day require some kind of further, more focused intervention.”
The standardised, consistent nature of such automated messaging is beneficial in and of itself.
Unclear, nuanced or open-to-interpretation messaging – particularly in a healthcare setting – can be counter-productive and create confusion.
“A human calling a human can cause messaging to be unintentionally inconsistent,” says Yu.
“Those human agents may be saying slightly different things. With approved scripts, a hospital knows exactly what it is saying to patients; no less, no more.
“In relation to the time of a missed appointment, for example, a patient might say they heard 3pm on a phone call as opposed to 1pm. Among the reports our solution provides is a transcription of a call; confirming exactly what was played to the patient.
Indeed, so called ‘no shows’ – when a patient fails to attend an appointment – waste huge amounts of clinical time and cost providers vast amounts of money.
“Our customers tell us that a single no show can cost up to $300,” says Yu.
“They say that issuing automated reminders has reduced the number of no shows by up to 85%. Again, the math is striking.”
Of course, success depends on user adoption.
Whilst we are all becoming more used to automated communication, it must be slick if users are to accept and trust it.
“The industry standard is that the phone rings, it is picked up, and the system waits for the person it has called to say hello in order to determine whether it is a live call or a voicemail,’ says Yu.
“Call recipients may then experience some silence and decide to hang up because they realise it is an automated call.
“We have updated our solution several times to add sophistication which mitigates against that. When the patient picks up the phone, the first thing they hear is an announcement telling them that it is a call from the hospital. We then continue with the message and the patient doesn’t have to say anything.
“The feedback has been really good, particularly when you consider that the majority of calls are to demographics such as the elderly or people not always comfortable with automated calling.
“We also recommend that our customers use a live human voice for recording their messages. We hold their hand and walk them through best practice.”
But what about privacy and security?
In the healthcare sector in particular, legal compliance and basic public confidence are surely non-negotiables?
“All of that is covered, of course,” says Yu.
“We are able to erase patients’ identifiable information in a database based on client preference. We are all becoming more trusting of automated calling because it is more and more prevalent in our lives.”
It all sounds like just what the doctor ordered!
To learn more about how ComputerTalk can help your healthcare organization leverage the power of automated calling, visit www.computer-talk.com
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