Kyruus Blog

Among the first things you want to consider when you’re ready to integrate chatbots is how they align with your product strategy and customer value proposition. In the healthcare space you'll also need to consider and account for the ethical, regulatory, compliance, and operational requirements in the design of the chatbot.

Recall the last time you scheduled a healthcare appointment. Now compare it to recent experiences searching for a flight or making a restaurant reservation. It’s not news that while other industries have become more accessible and consumer-oriented, healthcare has lagged behind. Navigating health resources can be an opaque process, with provider information strewn across various websites and often inconsistent between what’s available to consumers online and what’s available to those taking their calls in access centers. This makes it difficult for healthcare consumers to find the information they need to make informed decisions.

Patient engagement and experience are top of mind for health system leaders. As healthcare consumers increasingly demand efficient and personalized care, the pressure on health systems increases to engage with patients in new ways. Impact Advisors recently reported that more than 80% of CIOs view improving patient engagement and experience as a chief goal¹, underscoring the growing recognition among industry leaders of the critical need to compete on convenience and access to care.

Did you know that over 84% of American adults saw a physician in 2016?¹ You would think for an industry that has such a significant impact, they would make things easy, efficient, and consumer-friendly for its users. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for most. Reflect on the last time you were able to call and book an appointment to see a doctor for yourself or someone in your care. How would you rate that experience? Did you wonder if there was a better and more accessible way to find care?

It is in the most difficult times in a person's life that an organization has the opportunity to step up and make a difference. This is especially true in health care. A consistent patient experience is the key to providing a premium care experience and building loyalty. When we don't do this, customers are often inconvenienced, or at worst, receive costly, inappropriate care.

In our recent webinar, The Changing Role of the Modern Access Center: Transitioning from Transaction to Experience, Sarah Kier, Director of Operations at Emory Healthcare, and Kelli Kessack, Director of Access and Engagement at USF Health described how they’re growing their organizations to expand access to care and deliver the ideal patient experience. During this webinar, they shared their experiences scaling their respective organizations to champion patient access and provider utilization.

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:

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.

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.

Taking a look back at our most popular content pieces from 2017, one thing is clear—health system leaders are focusing on enhancing patient access and providing a consistent enterprise-wide patient experience. Health systems are evaluating their current patient access models to determine if they’re meeting patients’ preferences to schedule appointments in an efficient manner and they’re staying ahead of the latest healthcare consumer trends–online and offline–to establish priorities for the coming years.