Improving the Call Center Interaction Experience for Patients
By Matt Phillion
It’s a common thread in modern medicine: patients struggle to get care they need in a timely manner because they can’t reach their physicians. As we look for ways to improve communication between patient and provider, is there room for automation to pave the path between the two?
“There’s a real challenge in trying to balance having the experience completely tailored to the patient and also meeting bandwidth,” says Patty Hayward, general manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences with Talkdesk.
Hayward recently wrote about her own experiences when a loved one could not reach the provider she needed when a traumatic event occurred.
“It’s really difficult to navigate the two sides,” she continues. “And when you get into the ‘-ologies,’ especially at a large academic medical center, the interaction can’t be generic. Very specific things need to happen.”
It’s an easier lift at the primary care level, Hayward explains, to automate call center interactions, given the reasons patients would want to reach their PCPs.
“The challenge is we’ve built out these super specialized ways that people need to go visit a physician,” she says. “I was chatting with a gastroenterologist recently in a large academic medical center, and those are some of the most challenging because the high level of specialization can get in the way when you want to automate things. It’s not just the patient is sick and needs to be seen; and because the patient doesn’t live in our system, they can get frustrated. Layer in other issues like prior authorization and auto-declines and you end up with a very frustrated patient by the time they get to that specialist, facing delays of care that can have very detrimental effects.”
Just trying to get a hold of someone as a current patient can be a struggle, Hayward explains. Systems are built to keep people in silos, and meanwhile, there simply isn’t the funding to hire the number of staff needed to make it all work.
“It’s not that the clinical side doesn’t want to do all these things and service all these patients,” she says. “But on the physician side, you want to see the patients when there is an immediate need, but wait in line when it’s not urgent, and there’s a subtle nuance to that.”
Hayward points out a number of issues brought up in a recent article by Dr. Sachin H. Jain about the limitations and challenges of large call centers and how they interact with patients.
“We need to stop accepting incremental change and start making larger scale changes more quickly instead of these little crawls forward,” says Hayward. “We saw it during the pandemic, the great adoption of new technology because we were challenged. I think we’re at a point where we don’t have a choice but to make big changes.”
A personal experience
Hayward relates a very powerful example of access to physicians that happened to her own mother.
“My mother had a big event, and very easily could have died. It took years off her life, I know that much,” she says. “To not be able to get ahold of your specialist, when you’ve been calling and aren’t able to get a response for days, that’s a big problem.”
Her mother faces the challenge of multiple chronic illnesses. After a cortisone injection for severe hip pain, her blood sugar levels shot up. Her father followed the primary care physician’s sliding scale insulin instructions, but when her blood sugar stayed dangerously high for days, her PCP advised the family to consult her endocrinologist.
Hayward’s father was unable to get a response from the endocrinologist and, “ever the rule follower,” she says, refused to show up unannounced at the office. Her mother went on to spend five days in the ICU.
“The front staff were overwhelmed and couldn’t keep up,” she says. “Had there been some kind of centralized call center, her case could have been escalated.”
What solutions exist to help connect patients with the providers they need in a timely manner?
“I think there are a lot of tools we’re not using,” says Hayward. “And more importantly, processes aren’t changing to completely utilize the tools we have in place. Typically, in my experience, you’re using a small percentage of the features you’ve accessed from any technology. And when you do adopt new technology, you’re trying to bend it to your current processes.”
So how do you transform the process to take advantage of the tool set you’ve selected? That’s a question for the ages, Hayward says.
“It goes back to there not being enough time in the day to do your job and also look at process change,” she says. “Organizations need help and guidance, and access to consulting organizations that can look at process and change and improvement to help you along those paths.”
One such underutilized tool, Hayward points out, is journey mapping.
“This maps the journey from calling all the way through their journey inside the four walls of the organization and outside again. What does that journey look like today, and what do organizations want it to be?” says Hayward. “We don’t want to just rebuild what we already have. That’s not why you buy a product or technology. We want to transform.”
To make that level of change requires buy in and commitment from leadership, Hayward explains.
“It requires having stewardship at the executive level. Saying, ‘We know we’re busy but we’re going to do this and we’re not just going to hand it off to IT or managers at the contact center,’” she says. “It has to be up and down the entire organization, be aligned with what your goals are, and involve continuously checking in, not just pouring old wine in a new bottle.”
Change in partnerships as well as technology
Hayward also notes that there has been a shift in how organizations partner with technology vendors.
“I’ve noticed a shift in how organizations acquire tech,” she says. “Earlier in my career, it was much easier to partner and look at things holistically instead of just the features you’re buying. There was more discussion around goals and objectives and what they’re looking to accomplish so the vendor can align with that.”
There’s a level of interaction that’s been lost, Hayward explains.
“I think there’s a danger there in that you don’t understand who you’re partnering with: can they really partner with you or are they just selling you a piece of tech and leaving?” she says.
This is particularly important when creating call center options for the “-ologies,” Hayward continues.
“My experience has been with RFPs; the only thing is technical requirements, no vision, no laddering up to organizational goals and objectives those are tied to,” she says. “The goals play into the financial health of the organization, but nobody is just buying tech because they want to move to the cloud or want to update their tech. The reasonable answer is we want it to be easier for people to interact with their care.”
Healthcare can be and often is still slow to adopt technology that isn’t directly tied to treating patients, Hayward notes.
“The majority of the reason is that their main focus is providing excellent clinical care. Can they do that better by having better operational efficiencies that let them have more time and space with the patient? One hundred percent. It’s an important aspect of that,” she says.
The way to create better access to providers, Hayward says, is by embracing, not just technological change, but also transformational change.
“You need to do more than just change your platform,” she explains. “I would challenge leaders to think about it differently. The call center can’t just be an ask and answer machine. It needs the support of the care teams.”
These centers and how they are used need to be ingrained in a way that can transform both the patient experience and the financial situation of the organization, she says.
“How do we offload a lot of the volume in a way that allows automation to do its job? Is it going to be the same experience if they get to a person right away? No,” she says. “But every other industry has done that. It’s not unusual and you can still make it pleasant and get the patient the information they want.”
But that also means ensuring there is a clear way to move requests to an agent easily.
“You also need to uplevel those agents and give them the tools they need to do their jobs,” she says. “We’d love to see agents become care guides. Skillsets need to rise, and we need to deliver information to those agents, in real-time, so they know what to say next.”
This will enable more skilled, experienced agents to grow in their roles, find more satisfaction in the job, and provide the organization with better retention and continuity in the workforce.
“I was talking with an agent recently who said how much harder her job had become,” says Hayward. “I asked why, and she told me she used to get about 50% easy calls, and now 100% of the calls are more complex. And I said, ‘Looks like your contact center software is doing its job.’ This lets those agents practice at the top of their job description in the same way we want providers to have the ability to practice at the top of their license.”
Matt Phillion is a freelance writer covering healthcare, cybersecurity, and more. He can be reached at matthew.phillion@gmail.com.