Healthcare Reform Begins with Smarter Interactions
Healthcare reform is quickly changing the industry. The concepts of Medical Home, Accountable Care, Meaningful Use and Global Payments will require that companies foster more seamless and personalized interactions across patients, providers and payors while adhering to an incentive-based mandate to reduce costs. Insurance and health care companies can respond to these implications in one of two ways: with great efficiency or with great inefficiency.
For the employees tasked with providing customer service, the healthcare industry is challenged in a number of areas:
- Extraordinary complexity at the desktop – Specialists have much to navigate and manage: multiple legacy and external systems, electronic health records, insurance plans, plus issues around policies, privacy and compliance.
- Highly emotional conversations – Dealing with health and finances is personal, emotional and often painful. In addition, there may be distrust, anxiety or anger, even before the conversation commences. The healthcare contact center must not only perform effectively and efficiently, but specialists must be able to communicate and connect at a deeper level.
- Interacting with a broad range of “customers” – Many healthcare contact centers interact with patients, doctors, nurses, pharmacies, other providers and insurance companies.
- Advanced specialists – Somewhat unique to the healthcare industry is the need to staff contact centers with knowledge workers or specialists. For example, at Health Advocate, the contact center is staffed with nurses and insurance specialists, many of whom have years of field experience.
- Compliance and reporting – Because the healthcare system is highly regulated in most countries, contact centers must ensure compliancy as well as provide accurate reporting for both internal and external measurement.
- Business Transformation: Healthcare organizations are under increasing pressure to continually transform their business with new offerings and services while adhering to regulatory issues. This requires better tools for implementing and supporting changes in the contact center through process automation, intelligent agent guidance, and decision modeling.
Cincom Synchrony offers an innovative, cost-efficient way to overcome these challenges. Supported by a robust and highly flexible platform of IBM technologies, Synchrony is a powerful software application specifically designed to help customer care centers in healthcare provide smarter, streamlined experiences that deliver intended results, even for complex, cross-channel interactions that utilize multiple back-end applications
Learn how Synchrony and IBM are Guiding Smarter Interactions in Healthcare
