New contact center model helped Dana-Farber improve the patient experience

The Dana-Farber Most cancers Institute, a Harvard Healthcare University training hospital, recently underwent a adjust to its make contact with center to improve how it connects with patients.

“A single of our ambitions was to figure out a way to improve the affected person experience so that we could actually consist of and capture all of these various factors of make contact with for patients,” Kathleen Keavany, the vice president of Ambulatory Scientific Functions at the Dana-Farber Most cancers Institute explained in the course of a HIMSS20 Electronic session.

Starting off in 2017, Dana-Farber commenced shifting how it manages affected person phone calls and messages to improve the client experience.

Prior to this, the institute made use of outsourced sellers to guidance the overflow of affected person phone calls, had a complicated call routing with several entry factors and variants throughout 19 various ailment facilities and lacked the engineering architecture to guidance an effective operation, Keavany explained in the webinar.

“It turned into a lot of inefficiencies and led to patients not having a streamlined experience any time that they attained out to us,” she explained.

To deal with these shortcomings, Dana-Farber determined to adjust its affected person make contact with model to include things like enhanced organizational and technological developments.

It did so by way of the generation of its Welcome Centre, which is like “the virtual entrance doorway for Dana-Farber,” Keavany explained.

With the implementation of the Welcome Centre and the addition of more staff customers to guidance it, Dana-Farber established a new procedure flow for just about every affected person call variety. As an alternative of an outside seller taking affected person phone calls, actual staff customers are capable to aid callers.

“By achieving another person at Dana-Farber, it aided to improve the experience for patients and also considerably increased staff fulfillment in being capable to aid patients as they ended up calling in authentic-time,” Keavany explained.

Dana-Farber also released a new client relationship administration (CRM) system from Evariant to aid with its new model.

The system integrates facts from the institute’s electronic health records into the CRM so that when a affected person phone calls in, the staff member has all of the facts in one particular position.

Considering the fact that it commenced this implementation, Dana-Farber has documented that the new model removes redundancies from patients having to call back several periods to get facts, will allow staff to automate some of their tasks so they can spend more time with their patients, cuts down reliance on exterior answering products and services and boosts documentation of affected person phone calls.

Just after only a few months, it also noticed a 71% maximize in phone calls answered by Dana-Farber staff for each day and a 38% maximize in new affected person ingestion for each day given that taking on the new model.

“This was essentially in just the very first 6 to ten months in which persons started off to see considerable efficiencies,” explained Naomi Lenane, the CIO at the Dana-Farber Most cancers Institute.

Twitter: @HackettMallory
E-mail the author: [email protected]

Bettering the affected person experience is a central target for providers, but health units even now have a extensive way to go to adjust the traditional role of physician as consultant telling patients what they need to do. The target tends to be on the performance of how to supply treatment, but it is really more vital to target on the performance for patients, explained Gail MacKean, a founding member of Envision Citizens Collaborating for Well being. For more on this topic, click on below to look at the complimentary webinar “Well being Process Transformation: Bettering Inhabitants Well being Just after COVID-19,” on June sixteen at 11 a.m. CT.