Kyruus Blog

Without question COVID-19 has caused incredible disruption to industries across the board, with the healthcare sector experiencing some of the greatest challenges. At the same time, however, the pandemic has been a catalyst for rapid innovation, revealing opportunities to rethink and transform approaches to care delivery and access. From learning to operate remote call centers to looking for more digitally-enabled ways to engage with patients (e.g., virtual care, virtual assistants), the pandemic has pushed health systems to reimagine—and quickly—their approaches to enabling patient access.

Since the COVID-19 virus emerged in the U.S., the country’s health systems and hospitals have felt a significant strain on their resources and staff as they continue to face rising volumes of patients. Amid this chaos, many organizations have risen to the challenge, using technology to expand access and relieve some of the pressure on their limited resources. Here are some of the ways health systems are using technology to expand access to care during the pandemic:

How to read this graph: The bars illustrate the total number of searches for a term (e.g. diabetes) over the month via the Kyruus ProviderMatch platform and the heatmap breaks the data out by week.

While people across the world have had to adjust their lives in the face of the coronavirus crisis, hospitals, health systems, their staff, and the patients turning to them for care have undoubtedly felt the greatest impact. Healthcare organizations face the tough task of not only caring for the influx of patients needing assessment and care for coronavirus, but also ensuring they effectively facilitate care for patients in their communities with non-COVID-related medical needs, such as chronic conditions, mental health, and cancer.

While healthcare continues to play catch-up to other customer-obsessed and digital-first industries, 2019 became the year in which many health systems started to align their organization around a commitment to improving the patient experience. This is certainly clear looking at our most popular content pieces from 2019–healthcare leaders want analytics to measure patient access, insight into how consumers make care decisions, and best practices for partnering with their organization to execute consumerism initiatives, like online scheduling.

To transform access and experience in 2020, check out the list below of the four most downloaded resources from 2019:

Central to most health systems' patient access strategies is some version of "the 3 rights" - right care, right place, right time. These three dimensions are patient and health system focused, addressing both clinical and convenience factors that are important to patients, while also speaking to a health system's cost structure. However they don't sufficiently address factors that are important to the provider. "The 5 rights" builds upon the original three, adding “right patient” and “right preparation” in acknowledgement of the provider's integral role in maximizing the clinical appropriateness of a scheduled appointment.

In a previous blog post, we looked at how outdated provider directories can negatively impact patient access. This post explores the importance of effective provider data management and accurate provider directories in streamlining key operational processes across a health system.

This is the third post in our Call Center Patient Experience Series. Over the course of this three post series, we’ve explored some of the top barriers to patient access through health system call centers and how they impede a positive patient experience: outdated provider directories, limited patient-provider matching capabilities, and lack of visibility into provider availability.

This is the second post in our Call Center Patient Experience Series. Over the course of this three post series, we’ll explore some of the top barriers to patient access through health system call centers and how they impede a positive patient experience: outdated provider directories, lack of patient-provider matching capabilities, and insight into provider availability.

As we explored in an earlier blog, hospitals and health systems are struggling to deliver a great patient experience through their call centers – often the “front door” to their organization – due in large part to barriers to patient access. Over the course of a three post series, we’ll explore some of these top barriers and how they impede a positive patient experience: outdated provider directories, lack of patient-provider matching capabilities, and insight into provider availability.

Provider Directories & Patient Access

While demand for online self-service capabilities continues to rise, many patients still connect with a health system the old-fashioned way – over the phone. However, access centers frequently lack the resources to provide an effective, high-touch patient experience. In fact, our recent secret shopper report found that 82% of call centers were unable to book an appointment directly over the phone during the initial interaction. That’s not just a major barrier to patient access, it also means that most call centers are not equipped to deliver a call center experience that ends with a booked appointment, a big problem for converting demand and retaining patients in increasingly competitive markets.

2018 marked a year of disruption across the healthcare landscape. From the entrance of new players, like Amazon, JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway, to the mergers of prominent health systems, like Mercy Health and Bon Secours, organizations across the space were driven by a desire to meet consumer expectations for a more connected, patient-centric experience.