How CRM technology empowers hospitals to transform the patient experience

Most providers and patients can agree healthcare has substantial room for improvement when it comes to providing a consistently positive patient experience.

"Healthcare is incredibly personal," Don Stanziano, corporate vice president of marketing and communications at San Diego-based Scripps Health, said during a June 13 webinar sponsored by Evariant, a leading healthcare CRM solution suite provider, and hosted by Becker's Hospital Review. "It requires trust. We are engaging with patients when they're often under a lot of stress, when they're at their most vulnerable. The industry is complex and difficult to navigate — we have to find a way to make it easier."

The direct link between patient satisfaction scores on HCAHPS surveys and reimbursement, as well as the growing importance of branding and reputation in consumers' healthcare decisions, has pushed hospitals and health systems to prioritize efforts to improve the overall patient experience. Many of these efforts have centered on enhancing the actual delivery of care, but what many providers overlook is the fact that for most patients, the care experience begins before they even walk through the hospital doors. It often begins online or with a phone call to a call center.

Unprepared call center agents can drive away prospective patients

Call centers have traditionally operated as response-based departments, merely reacting to each prospective patient's calls and questions without any prior knowledge of the individual's medical history or needs. Although 70 percent of consumers do research online before interacting with a contact center, healthcare call center agents do not enter the conversation armed with the any relevant information on the individual. Consumers often end up frustrated with the process, which may include answering the same questions and being repeatedly transferred to different call center agents at siloed departments.

The stakes of a dissatisfied customer experience with a call center are high: 45 percent of consumers completely stop activity with an organization that offered poor customer service.

Call centers must become proactive — not reactive — if they want to attract and retain patients in their system, and importantly, if they want to provide a superior personalized care experience.

The solution lies in database technology that uses customer relations management data to help staff provide individualized customer service. CRM platforms aggregate and centralize data on each patient's prior interactions with the health system — such as online inquiries, social media tags or previous phone calls — as well as medical information and even monetary transactions. With these insights, agents can proactively anticipate and address patients' needs effectively and efficiently.

"With the technology, if a caller is in our database we can see all of their previous touchpoints," said Mr. Stanziano. "If another representative helped them a week ago, we have a record of that and can reference that as [the representative] assists them. We can see if they've registered for a health education class online or if we've mailed them information at home. When we pick up the phone and answer their call, we can see their past experience with us, which helps us customize their experience."

On the road to "utopia" — replacing the call center with the engagement center

The call center and marketing department traditionally function as disparate entities. But by combining them, healthcare organizations can truly leverage the insights derived from marketing outreach efforts to support the representatives who communicate with patients.

In the marketing department, a CRM platform stores data on all inbound and outbound calls, marketed events, web inquiries and campaign responses, provider and service referrals and reminders about follow-up care. It centralizes and tracks these interactions in the cloud, through which marketing representatives can nurture "leads" — or retain patients in the system.

By gaining access to data stored in the CRM, the call center can transform into an engagement center that provides a 360-degree view of a patient. By seeing and understanding patients' prior experiences in the system, the call agent may be better equipped to anticipate their needs and provide a more personalized experience and spare the patient from redundant questions. By turning a call center into an "engagement center," healthcare organizations take one step closer to providing a "utopia" customer experience for patients, according to Rachel Neely, senior healthcare consultant at Evariant.

"For healthcare organizations, utopia means delivering a rich, personalized interaction to a patient — everything is integrated on the same page," said Ms. Neely. "Engagement center reps need valuable information and insights at their fingertips to help the customer with what they need. They require well-coordinated information and content that is relative to their needs at the right time and the right place."

Case study: Scripps Health

San Diego-based Scripps Health, a $3.1 billion health system, implemented Evariant's CRM solution suite in 2015 to improve the efficacy of its contact center operations and improve alignment with its marketing and branding efforts. Prior to implementing the solution, Scripps struggled to remedy several key deficiencies, such as a lack of data integration, a limited ability to enable holistic, customer-centric experiences and minimal connections to strategic initiatives.

Before transforming into an engagement center, Scripps' contact center representatives had no opportunity to be proactive. Now, in addition to answering inbound calls, "we're doing a lot more outbound calls — not just following up with previous callers but reaching out to customers we see engaging with us on other channels, whether through email or social media," said Mr. Stanziano.

The engagement center supports the goals of the triple aim, which include reducing the cost of care, delivering higher quality and more timely care and improving overall health outcomes, Mr. Stanziano explained. "Not only because it's an efficient use of the marketing dollar, but because engagement center agents use marketing best practices to steer patients toward more tailored health services, which supports the delivery of care."

View the webinar here.

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