In the past 100 years, the world has been devastated by several pandemics – the 1918 or Spanish flu pandemic, SARS (coronavirus infection), Avian influenza (H5N1 infection), H1N1 Swine flu infection and the new COVID-19, which is disrupting lives, livelihoods, communities, and businesses – in rich and poor countries alike!

Our first line of defense against any health crisis, be it an infectious disease, natural disaster, terrorist act, or explosive disaster, is hospitals and healthcare workers- which play an integral role in saving thousands of lives in our communities.

Any incident that can cause a patient surge in hospitals requires a multi-jurisdictional and multi-functional response that includes appropriate emergency planning and provision of healthcare services at the right time and place. Without this, our health systems can easily become overwhelmed by the demand for medical services, which can lead to unnecessary suffering and loss of human life.

Therefore, it is our responsibility to enhance the readiness of healthcare facilities to cope with unanticipated challenges and uncertainties during a crisis like the disruption of communication, shortage of critical equipment and resources, staff safety and workload, etc. Hospitals need to be ready to facilitate a timely and effective response not only in the health centers, but also in their contact centers to address the influx of calls from concerned patients.

During a crisis, contact centers immediately become an emergency lifeline for people, and they must remain the best, professional and friendly points of contact for customers, as they are in non-disaster, non-crisis instances. This blog piece will discuss some of the essential things that CX leaders in healthcare should consider and keep in mind while striving to stay operational and protect both their organizations and themselves as the pandemic continues.

Providing adequate care for a larger number of patients in the context of an escalating outbreak is extremely challenging. It is difficult to ensure critical healthcare services in a complex and partially ravaged healthcare system, running at full capacity. But, this doesn’t stop people from panicking and calling health care providers to contain the virus as soon as they develop any flu-like symptoms.

Here, the CX leaders need a proactive approach to deal with the surge in call volumes, communicate effectively within the providers, plan for appropriate call routing, and escalating medical inquiries in the right direction.

That’s why leading customer-centric healthcare providers choose Acqueon’s AI-assisted conversational engagement platform to provide a CX that goes beyond the status quo. With a distributed work-from-home operating model that can enable organizations to shift their agents to virtual work environments quickly, Acqueon transforms patient-provider relationships in four key areas: Convenience, Communication, Support, and Personalization.

Convenience

Integrated with the customer database and CRM, Acqueon enables healthcare providers to facilitate all inbound and outbound interactions intelligently and proactively. From appointment setting to scheduling, the agents can contact patients at their preferred day/time and using their preferred channel (voice, text, email, etc.). Furthermore, with intelligent call routing based on specific patient requirements, incoming calls can be routed directly to the agent/medical professional best suited to support the patients’ immediate needs

Communication

With Acqueon’s built-in statistical and predictive models and a unified communication ecosystem, agents get to deliver the right message at the right time to the right customers. When the dialer connects the agents with patient, the agents will have a contextual understanding of the patient’s full journey right at their fingertips. Armed with next-best-action intelligence, the agents become more engaging and conversational with the patients to maximize the potential of every conversation, improving the conversion and retention rates. The agents can also capture queries and any other customer-facing information through multiple channels while tracking response rates and automatically updating the records.

Support

With Acqueon, everything is automated. The conversational engagement platform will automatically remind patients to take medications, refill medications, and even accept patient authorization electronically and trigger processing and fulfillment. Automated reporting also helps medical staff closely track medication dispensing, authorization, etc. Acqueon can also proactively send outbound campaigns like pre-emptive care communication, wellness updates, and lifestyle tips to patients with specific medical conditions such as diabetes. The platform ensures frictionless hospital processes and easy claim filing with minimum agent intervention, besides facilitating health claims, reimbursements, and healthcare plan enrollment.

Personalization

Acqueon proactively sends instant, personalized messages for appointment confirmations, rescheduling, cancellation, drug administration, refilling, claim updates, payment reminders, etc. The platform provides an incredible boost to offer a proactive, personalized engagement across all channels, increased patient retention, agent productivity, and efficiency in optimizing customer support, data privacy, and compliance.

The following are some of the highlights of the Acqueon conversational engagement solution:

    • Ability to handle increased call volume by introducing new workflow processes that can triage emergency calls from other medical call inquiries.
    • Intelligent call routing for agents to properly route and escalate medical inquiries.
    • Cloud-based technology allows remote, home-based workers to handle call volume and collaborate and communicate with supervisors and peers as needed to provide real-time responses.
    • Clear performance metrics and communication plans on emergency management
    • Automated appointments that are directed to specified medical and healthcare staff based on availability, expertise or location.
    • Personalized messaging for appointment confirmations, rescheduling, cancellation, drug administration and instructions, drug refilling, etc.
    • Frictionless pre-registration hospital processes, online bill payment, registration, claim filling, status updates, payment reminders, and authorization with minimum agent intervention.
    • Call-back management to avoid long queues and significantly reduce patient frustration.
    • 360-degree view of each patient by aggregating and analyzing contact center and enterprise data.
    • Ability to understand the time-of-day and communication channel preferences of the patients and improve the contact rates.
    • Personalized outreaches based on preferred channel and time/day of every contact.
    • Increased contact connection rates by orchestrating and executing highly targeted and personalized outbound communications campaigns.
    • Integrated contact monitoring and digital voice/screen recording and real-time analytics.
    • Regulatory Compliance for DNC and consumer privacy and protection legislation e.g. TCPA, GDPR, CCPA, and Ofcom); built-in data privacy and compliance tools.