Five Best Practices in Call Center Automation - Sponsored Whitepaper

Five Best Practices in Communication Center Automation for Hospitals

The communication center of any hospital serves an extraordinarily important function. As the nerve center of often huge operations serving hundreds of callers and thousands of patients a day, the communication operation is assigned the task of everything from finding a physician who can give advice that can save a life to helping a caller locate a relative recovering from a surgery. It is the connective tissue of the modern medical network.

With cost pressures building in health care, however, the communication center has been assigned the additional burden of making themselves more efficient, more effective and less costly to operate. It can be a tall order to fill, especially with call volumes increasing annually at most health care providers. Many organizations that have reorganized and re-energized their communication centers have turned to “best practices” methodologies to gain productivity while improving performance of their staffs and managers.

The best practices movement has been strong in many industries. It represents, in fact, a sharing of information that may be valuable to competitors and collaborators alike. In health care, the movement toward best practices has been seen in the growing success of “evidence-based” medicine which collects the best data available before proffering treatment to individual patients. Best practices techniques for operations such as communication centers collect aggregated data and experience from a broad spectrum of health care providers who have undergone signicant – and successful – transformations. Those results form the basis of what the industry sees as “best practices” for successful implementations in the future.

This white paper will showcase the experience of one health care provider who has achieved higher productivity through changes to their communication centers through ve strategies: automation, consolidation of call center operations, making the right technology choices, creation of new work processes and development of an authentic “team” environment. The paper investigates the tactics underlying these strategies and shows how they form an effective platform for producing a communication center more capable of handling growing call volume while efficiently helping customers locate the staff and information they need.