Kyruus Blog

The Healthcare Call Center Times Conference hosts healthcare leaders from across the country passionate about empowering their call centers to improve patient access. This year highlighted the growing importance of the call center in a health system’s strategy. Throughout the conference, three key themes stood out as critical ways call centers are thinking about their role in driving customer engagement and retention:

While we’re all aware that healthcare is a bit behind other industries on consumer engagement, we can’t understate that our objectives and complexities far exceed airfare and fine dining. Even still, the voice of the healthcare consumer is strengthening and it's changing the conversation about healthcare and how it's delivered. As patients take a more active role in their care and that of their relatives, they are spending more time online —and they expect their interactions to be more convenient, accessible, and digital.

Analytics are becoming increasingly important in healthcare: marketers use it to optimize their campaigns, population health researchers use it to identify at-risk populations, and physicians use it to decide which drugs to prescribe. However, with healthcare organizations and patients generating so much data, it’s sometimes impossible to make sense of it–or make the data actionable. In fact, the amount of health information produced is doubling every three years, and by 2020 it is estimated to double every 73 days.¹ And while the quantity of data is intimidating for most, it also offers health systems an opportunity to drive change, especially to improve patient access.

As the healthcare landscape continues to evolve and patients seek out convenient and affordable care, being able to leverage existing data will be critical to expanding access to care and maintaining patient loyalty. Here’s how to use your data to lay the foundation for enhanced access:

For most health systems, keeping provider directories up-to-date is an ongoing issue: provider networks, and information about providers themselves, change constantly. Our recent white paper looks at some of the key areas where accurate, centralized provider data management can boost the health system’s bottom line (from improving marketing operations to optimizing provider networks). But what about the impact to patients entering the system? Inaccurate, incomplete provider data has the power to negatively impact the patient experience—from inaccurate referrals to access to timely care in a convenient location. This post looks at three patient scenarios where inaccurate provider data has the potential to hurt the patient experience:

With great certainty, we get patients to the right doctors — every time.
– Andi Kolodny, Director, Physician Referral Services at Hospital for Special Surgery

At Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), one of the nation’s leading orthopedic hospitals, providers are grouped into very specialized service lines. When appropriate routing requires such a granular knowledge of providers’ unique expertise, Andi Kolodny’s team in the Physician Referral Services Center rely heavily on rich provider information to help them make quick, informed decisions about which providers a patient should see. By leveraging a centralized provider directory, the HSS team is able to understand each physician’s unique expertise, as well as logistical information to meet patients’ needs (e.g., insurances accepted and provider practice locations), and get patients to the right provider, every time.

In an article, "Healthcare can take a lesson from the airline industry, doctors say,” FierceHealthcare recently covered an opinion piece by Sinsky and Privitera from JAMA which highlights the need to improve the clinical work environment by essentially creating a less cluttered mental landscape for physicians. This isn’t proposing we teach a greater resiliency to putting up with the clutter, but instead addresses the meaningful ways in which we might create better and safer working conditions. 

Consumers are ready for online scheduling. A huge barrier is that health systems struggle to consolidate complex healthcare data sources, administrative workflows, and appointment types into a consumer-friendly online experience.

Health systems have a multitude of “front doors” (i.e., patient access points) and, as today’s care networks continue to evolve in size and scope, linking those points is becoming a growing priority. Recently, Katie Logan, VP of Experience at Piedmont Healthcare and Andy Hare, Associate VP of Access Services at UAB Medicine, joined Healthcare Informatics and Kyruus on a webinar, “Taking a Multi-Channel Approach to Access.” Both Piedmont Healthcare and UAB Medicine are pursuing significant initiatives to transform how patients access their health systems and transition within them.

"You can’t have an e-commerce or online strategy without a catalog, it’s impossible. ...It’s the foundational struts of everything else that you do."
– Aaron Martin, EVP, Chief Digital Officer at Providence St. Joseph Health

Last year in our centralized patient access webinar series with Culbert Healthcare Solutions, we discussed top things health system leaders need to know about access centers, focusing primarily on processes, technology, and staffing. In this blog, we will highlight the benefits of centralized access from the patient’s perspective by contrasting two different patient access scenarios.