Multi-site Family Planning and Wellness Centers

health

Multi-site Family Planning and Wellness Centers

Challenge:
Family Planning and Wellness Center sought a solution to help the organization to (1) increase patient satisfaction scores (2) improve revenue (3) increase amount of time nurse leaders devote to patient care.

Administration wanted to find a way to improve customer service by allowing the callers to gain access to appointment schedulers in the least amount of time. Typical hold time averaged between five and seven minutes to get a live operator. When call volume was excessive, callers given option to leave a voicemail or hold. As a result, typical voicemail volume per office averaged 70-85 voicemails messages per day, with nurses often having to respond to non-clinical issues

Patients were not happy with service and supervisory staff was bogged down with taking numerous patient complaints about the wait time to get a call back. In addition to patient complaints, administrator took calls from a number of physicians complaining about not being able to reach clinic staff.

Solution
Appointment scheduling line re-routed to Call 4 Health for live operator coverage from 7:00am to 7:00 pm Through web-based interface, and VPN connection, Call 4 Health remotely accessed the health centers’ EMR system Established e-mail message delivery of non-urgent messages for each practitioner

Results

  • Improved the average answering speed from average 5 minutes to 36 seconds
  • Increased the availability of operators to handle and triage appointment calls vs non-urgent clinical questions for nurse follow-up
  • Call center scheduled 292 more patient appointments per month than the office staff, with 30% being new patients
  • Increase in appointments produced an additional $37,475 in revenue per month, which is more than 10 times the return on their investment
  • The scheduling department was able to reduce their work force by one FTE, while simultaneously increasing staff productivity by 25%
  • Nurses able to focus on patient care as they were no longer clearing off high volumes of voicemail messages
  • Patient satisfaction scores, measured through survey, increased