The Top Five Reasons to Outsource to a Healthcare Call Center
As the health care industry continues to focus on value-based care and triple aim initiatives, health systems looks to leverage call center services to support their objectives. Many health systems have created internal call centers only to find that not only has the ROI been disappointing or hard to prove, but also the required operational resources have exceeded expectations.
Below are five main reasons that our health system clients tell us that they made the decision to partner with AccessNurse.
1) Operational Costs Exceeded Budget
It takes a great deal of experience and expertise as well as the right technology to operate a medical call center efficiently. Large steady-state volume and contingency scheduling is required to maintain service levels with volume fluctuations efficiently. While some hospitals may have large volume in some service lines such as scheduling, other service line volumes don’t support the staff for the required service levels, and cross training of staff is not always successful.
For one AccessNurse client with 20K calls per month, we were able to reduce the average call from 15 minutes with their internal staff to 7.5 minutes with our staff. Additionally, their average speed of answer went from 4 minutes to just 30 seconds – all while providing significant cost containment.
That is the power of experience and the technology we utilize at AccessNurse!
2: Lack of an Adequate Quality Program
Without a dedicated quality team that possesses the experience that comes with hundreds of thousands of calls every month, it is difficult to build and maintain a robust and consistent quality program. Additionally, some hospital systems lack the reporting ability to identify opportunities for improvement. AccessNurse employs a dedicated team of call center quality specialists who constantly monitor our services at a granular level. We have two quality committees comprised of management staff, AccessNurse medical directors and other client health care providers.
3: Management Infrastructure Deficits
AccessNurse has recruited and hired call center executives from some the country’s largest call centers to lead our management team and develop policies and procedures to support the services we offer. We also have talented managers and administrators who have been with us since our inception in 1996 and who have intimate knowledge of our journey and the needs of our clients. AccessNurse has created a deep management infrastructure to support our staff, service levels and individual client requirements. Throughout the past 23 years, we have learned the value of this investment to our clients.
4: Account Management Expertise and Dedication
Many of AccessNurse’s clients have come to us with call center leadership in place that will continue to manage the outsourced services. We partner these leaders with a dedicated, experienced account manager to create a seamless services that embodies the elements of the hospital call center that were working well, while replacing the weak areas with what we know to be best practices. AccessNurse Account Managers become a member of our clients’ teams to achieve organizational objectives. In effect, the account manager becomes the single point person for the client relationship.
We value the knowledge of your organization that you bring to us and always seek to work in the spirit of a true collaborative partnership.
5: Lack of Adequate Technology
Hospital systems come to AccessNurse with a number of opportunities for improvement and often don’t realize that the source of their deficiencies lie in inadequate technology. We have created flexible documentation and communication systems that encompass the needs of some of the largest and most prestigious hospital systems across the country. We have a staff of more than 200 I.T. professionals and currently have more than 300 EMR interfaces in place, as well as other customized programming jobs designed to meet each of our clients’ unique needs.
