Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health’s contact center fields about 260,000 calls a month, roughly 80% to 90% of them tied to primary care clinics across the 34-hospital system.
That volume presents more than just a challenge.
“We see a massive opportunity for our continued investment in our AI voice assistant,” said Matt Baird, assistant vice president of consumer experience at Intermountain. “Our goal is there are certain skills or customer tasks that the voice assistant can handle, and our focus has been on what are the tasks that are rules-based, repeatable, and easy to do.”
The math behind that bet: the average handle time on a call is about 5 1/2 minutes. “If we could offer self-service for upwards of 20% to 30% of those in terms of self-scheduling for a new or existing patient, that volume is just incredible in terms of savings, and improving also the customer experience,” Mr. Baird said at Becker’s Marketing Leadership Forum on Sept. 15 in Chicago.
That’s still a target, not a result. But the system does have one early proof point suggesting patients will take the option when it’s offered. Intermountain has been piloting self-scheduling for diagnostic imaging this year, turning it on for three modalities over the past couple of months.
“We’re seeing early adoption ranges in the neighborhood of about 30% of self-scheduling in those diagnostic imaging [modalities] — that’s a huge win for us,” Mr. Baird said. “Those are just early indicators of where we can go. Within just a couple of months of launch, seeing about a 30% adoption in self-scheduling is a strong indicator of the preference of our consumers.”
The contact center sits on top of a technology stack Mr. Baird described as still maturing. “We have a telephony system. We also have Salesforce CRM,” he said. “And the last piece, which has proven to be a really valuable investment for us, is we have a partner in Qualtrics for capturing all of our customer sentiment and feedback.”
Intermountain has historically operated its contact center as three separate regions, a legacy of past mergers and acquisitions. “We’re now in the process of centralizing that tech stack to one instance across the system for our entire contact center,” he said. “Any customer in any location or geography where Intermountain is represented could call one number 24/7, and the AI voice assistant that’s answering that call will have some context of their journey, of campaigns they’ve received, interactions in the past, and their medical [history].”
The team reached its own milestone this past year, too: its first full year fully live on Epic systemwide, which Mr. Baird called a major undertaking. “Our ability to layer on AI and other technologies that enable more capability and competency of our [patient services representatives] is just going to be a huge win for us,” he said.
Intermountain is also targeting the referral gap that opens once a patient leaves a primary care visit. “We have a massive multiyear goal around next-step navigation,” Mr. Baird said. “By the end of next year, we want to be offering those patients up to 65% to 70% of the time that opportunity to have that next appointment scheduled.” That’s meant to eliminate the burden on patients to track down and understand where their own referrals and orders stand.
Asked what made the self-scheduling push succeed where similar efforts elsewhere stall, Mr. Baird pointed to how the goal was set, not just the technology behind it. “We’ve seen a large amount of success when these come from a system KPI and/or board goal, because it’s easy to garner buy-in by all the different functions, but those are really generated at that leadership level based on conversations and understanding of the system as a whole,” he said.
“An enterprise contact center, ticketed scheduling, and next-step navigation are focused on referrals, and so what you can see is they all ladder up to what we probably would identify as maybe two or three major themes,” he said. “Enabling that self-scheduling [requires] a massive lift to do decision trees with each specialty, and then integrate any technology through our Epic platform — that requires buy-in from our digital team, our medical group, rev cycle, at all levels.”
