How A Cloud-Hosted Call Center Can Benefit Your Healthcare IT Clients

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

Patient expectations of healthcare service are increasingly shaped by their retail experiences. One of the core elements of that is the call center. The seemingly archaic concept offers convenience, personalization, and flexibility that few other modes of communication can rival.

Bringing the call center into 2015 is a perfect job for cloud technology, which will enable doctors, nurses, other practitioners, and care coordinators new options in patient communication that aren’t confined by geography or physical location. Physicians can remain connected with patients with little more than an Internet-abled device and a good connection.

Benefits For Patients

Through a call center, patients are provided with continuous access to care that extends beyond clinician access and their own mobility issues — something that’s incredibly important as the U.S. healthcare system faces a steadily aging population. Having these options not only increases patient comfort, but also improves overall quality of care.

Additional options such as skills-based routing, IVR, and enhanced caller ID allow patient calls to be routed to the most appropriate care provider based on comprehensive information, thereby mirroring the service they would receive in a clinic as closely as possible.

Benefits To Healthcare Providers

Your clients will see multiple benefits from using cloud-based call center software solutions.

They can take advantage of the flexibility and affordability of remote teams, and can handle calls at any time of day, all while increasing patient satisfaction — something that will become increasingly important to them as they move into the patient-centered Stage 3 of Meaningful Use.

Mark Caron, CEO of healthcare analytic and technology solutions company, Geneia, offered his opinion on the intersection of federal regulations and the cloud-hosted call center in the age of “person-centered” care: “As this shift happens to ‘person-centered care,’ healthcare providers must overcome process, training and tools challenges.  They not only need to identify trends and specific gaps at a population level, but then must implement longitudinal plans of care with each patient — the ‘person.’  To do so requires predictive analytics for transparency at this level of personalization of care. Further, robust analytics tools can provide both integration and interoperability, to bring together silos of information to be shared across the continuum of care — necessary to truly know and care for the ‘person.’  Solutions/channel providers benefit from this change as it creates the impetus for the delivery system to evolve — not all too different from the forces created by HITEC [the Health Information Exchange for Economic and Clinical Health Act] and the ACA [Affordable Care Act].  Each act has moved the healthcare industry from a fee-for-service to a value-based, interoperable, and person-centered model.  We all benefit from systems that work together in a streamlined way.  All constituents are in a better position — from patients to clinicians to hospitals to payers — when actionable data leads to better outcomes.”

Going Deeper

To read more on how cloud implementations can impact your clients’ IT departments, read “What MSPs Need To Know About The Impact Of Cloud Computing On Clients’ IT Departments.”