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How UNC Health got 93% of their inbound calls answered within 30 seconds
UNC Health and Gozio
UNC Health app increases patient engagement through WELL Health® and Gozio partnership, resulting in a 443% increase in mobile app downloads.
“From an end-user perspective, everything feels like it’s a UNC Health experience and, that’s where I think this is really unique.”
Dan Dodson
System Director, ISD Digital Health and Innovation, UNC Health
Clinical Support Staff Steve and the journey through patient communication in healthcare
Clinical Support Staff Steve
Reduce Call Volume Guide
Health systems are overwhelmed with high call volumes. 82% of clinical support staff report frustration with communicating and coordinating with patients over the phone. They spend hours on the phone each day dealing with routine administrative tasks. As a result, patients face long hold times, fail to show up for appointments, and delay care.
The Problem with High Call Volume
Patient Dissatisfaction
High call volume means patients have to wait on hold, something no one enjoys.
Increased Costs
The accumulated cost of playing “phone tag” for rescheduled appointments adds up fast – especially for a large health system with numerous patients.
Inefficiency
Every hour that a staff member spends handling calls is an hour they are not spending on more valuable tasks such as setting appointments, targeted outreach, slot-filling, and patient care.
7 Tips to Reduce Call Volume
Let patients text you back
Let patients text you back
Any type of communication is most successful when it’s not one way. Enabling bi-directional texting can drastically reduce phone tag since both patients and staff can respond when it’s convenient.
Offer support in the languages your patients speak
Offer support in the languages your patients speak
Texting patients in their preferred language is key to facilitating patient communications without needing a translator to call.
Reach multiple patients at once with the same message
Reach multiple patients at once with the same message
For last-minute schedule changes, inclement weather, or important notifications, providers can use Broadcast Messaging to quickly select up to 1,000 patients in WELL and send them all a customized message using Smart Phrases, pulling in patient information from the EHR or scheduling system.
Use the data you already have to customize messages to groups of similar patients
Use the data you already have to customize messages to groups of similar patients
Campaign Messaging enables you to upload patient lists from any of your existing databases and send specific messaging to that unique group of patients. Campaigns can push text, email, or calls based on patient preferences.
Send automated reminders
Send automated reminders
Automate repetitive outreach tasks such as appointment reminders, confirmation requests, recalls, referral workflows, follow-ups, thank you messages, and more.
Transition patients from call to text
Transition patients from call to text
Call to Text allows patients an easy transition to texting with a staff member instead of continuing to wait on hold.
Implement AI-enabled texting
Implement AI-enabled texting
Imagine if 50% or more of patient conversations were completed without staff intervention. AI-enabled technology such as WELL® ChatAssist AI can independently navigate common patient communication needs based on a patient’s response.
“Our patients love (WELL). It’s overdue; we should have been on this a long time ago. Patients can do multiple things, send a text, and not have to be waiting around for a response.”
David Ramirez
Clinical Support Technician at Altura Centers for Health
Reduce Call Volume
Reduce inbound and outbound call volume with these 7 strategies
Riverside Medical Center (RMC) is the largest physician-owned practice in California, with over 170 providers and 400,000 patient visits per year. Their patient service representatives were spending most of their day trying to get patients on the phone. After using WELL for bidirectional texting with their patients and sending bulk communications, RMC’s largest call center decreased their call volume by 6%.
RMC saw a 33% decrease in no-shows in the first month of using WELL.
RMC’s second-largest call center saw phone volume decrease by over 4%.
Before WELL, the office staff at this not-for-profit health system in the Coachella Valley were spending as much as two hours every day on the phone performing routine administrative tasks. WELL saved the staff so much time, they were able to focus more patient-centered activities and follow-up.
Using WELL, office staff saw the time they spent on the phone per day drop from as much as two hours to as low as 15 minutes, a decrease of 88 percent.
An FQHC with eight locations, 50 providers, and 140,000 annual patient visits, Altura was experiencing tens of thousands of phone calls every year, and their staff couldn’t process the high volume. Patients were spending too much time on hold, and satisfaction levels were falling. In using WELL, Altura found a solution that automatically synced with their EHR and most importantly, their call volume decreased while their patient satisfaction scores doubled.
With WELL, patients found the texting platform convenient, so call volume dropped by 10%.
Lower call volume has led to more staff satisfaction and less burnout.
Jefferson Healthcare
WELL® streamlines health system’s patient communications, leading to a 25% decrease in call volume, 40% drop in no-shows for the largest primary care clinic, and 10-15% increase in bill payments.
“What would have been a possible no-show – We’re able to see that cancellation immediately and try and refill that spot,” said Rachel Barbieto, Business Applications Analyst. “We’re able to utilize provider schedules more efficiently now.”
Patient Communication Platform: Buyer’s Guide
As patient expectations rise, providing a seamless patient experience becomes even more essential to remaining competitive.
The Definitive Buyer’s Guide to a Patient Communication Platform breaks the evaluation process into six steps with helpful worksheets for each. After using this guide, you’ll be able to:
- Define your organization’s business needs
- Identify what features your health system needs most
- Gain support from key stakeholders in your organization
- Decide on your top vendor choice
This guide provides a comprehensive and flexible overview of how to choose a unified patient communication platform that supports your company’s goals. Start at the beginning and work your way through each step or choose which steps are most relevant to your organization.
6 Steps to Choosing A Patient Communication Platform
Outline Why You Need A Patient Communication Platform
Outline Why You Need A Patient Communication Platform
As patients continue to have more options for their healthcare providers, providing a patient experience that allows your organization to stand out is essential to remaining competitive.
Identify Key Stakeholders, Decision-Makers, And Their Concerns
Identify Key Stakeholders, Decision-Makers, And Their Concerns
Patient communication can be used to provide improvements for many departments and employees in a health system, so it’s important to determine who will be most impacted.
Research Vendors
Research Vendors
Determine which vendors have the features that fit your buying criteria.
Set A Timeline
Set A Timeline
A timeline will help keep everyone accountable for their specific roles and ensure steady progress in this purchase decision.
Evaluate Vendors
Create A Business Case & Make A Decision
Create A Business Case & Make A Decision
Build a good business case for your first choice by using the information in the worksheets and quantifying the cost of the solution by how much time and money it will save your organization.
Children’s Wisconsin Uses Wayfinding to Provide Concierge Patient Service
Navigating a huge hospital system can be intimidating for families especially when dealing with a sick child so Children’s Wisconsin wanted a solution that would provide directions for their patients and families all the way to their appointment door. Read about how Children’s Wisconsin brought their wayfinding technology and WELL Health® together to create a “Google Maps” of their hospital by matching up department ID numbers through Epic.
“Wayfinding highlights a very high-touch concierge service for our families. That’s rare in any industry but is even more critical in healthcare.” – Christopher Neuharth, Executive Director, Digital Health Experience
Reducing Patient No-Show Rates: A Comprehensive Guide
High patient no-show rates have a negative impact across the healthcare network. They damage provider revenue, and they prevent patients from receiving optimal care – a serious lose-lose.
A central cause of no-show rates is patients lacking a convenient and easy way to communicate with providers. Many providers still force patients to pick up the phone, or wrestle with clunky portals. They fail to meet them in a digital medium that is easy, convenient, and multilingual. When providers improve their overall patient communication, no-shows rates reliably fall.
How can providers implement the right strategies to reduce no-show rates in primary care? And what results can they expect? Read our guide for 8 tangible strategies.
The Cost of Patient No-Show Rates
When a patient doesn’t appear for a check-up, surgery, or consultation, it leads to wasted capacity and suboptimal care.
$200
per appointment
$150 billion
every year
Delayed care
for patients
U.S. research has shown that up to 31.5% of no-shows fail to show up because of poor provider communication.
8 Tips to Reduce Patient No-Show Rates
Use the patient’s preferred method of contact
Help patients understand the need for the appointment
Use automated patient appointment reminders
Calm patient fears
Reduce the time between scheduling an appointment and the actual appointment
Reduce the time between scheduling an appointment and the actual appointment
Read the guide for more details.
Offer digital check-in and updates on scheduling issues
Offer digital check-in and updates on scheduling issues
Download the guide for more tips.
Text patients to reschedule
Send follow-up messages
Download the guide
Download the guide
How can providers implement the right strategies to reduce no-show rates in primary care? Read our comprehensive guide for more strategies.
70%
of American healthcare consumers prefer texting to schedule their appointments
91%
want to be informed about the status of their ill loved ones via text
83%
like to receive reminders from physicians for prescriptions, schedule confirmations, follow-up appointments, and more.
How WELL Improves Patient-Provider Communication
The WELL platform reliably cuts patient no-show rates by equipping healthcare providers with a sophisticated and centralized communication software that simplifies patient-provider communication. From a unified platform, providers can engage patients in one-on-one, back-and-forth text conversations at scale.
Providers can tailor their messages based on their patient’s profile, previous interactions, and current treatment plan. Personalized messaging empowers patients to become more engaged and involved with their health, thus contributing to the reduction of patient no-show rates.
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Case Study
Community Memorial Health System
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Case Study
Eisenhower Health
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Case Study
Tiburcio Vazquez Health Center
Community Memorial Health System (CMHS) is a large healthcare system that had a legacy appointment reminder system that didn’t allow patients to respond. Every day, CMHS staff had to call patients to remind them of their appointments. But after using WELL for two months, CMHS saw immediate results.
CMHS’s no-show rate dropped by 29%, resulting in an estimated $1,169,600 increase in annual revenue.
“It became obvious to us very early that (WELL) was going to eliminate a lot of work… and it did.” – Lori Hooks, Director of Quality and Practice Systems.
Located in Coachella Valley, CA, health system Eisenhower Health grappled with high call volume. Staff spent as much as two hours on the phone each day dealing with appointment reminders yet patients were still frequently no-shows. Eisenhower Health had to find a way to decrease no-shows to maintain revenue. After using WELL, the staff saw the time they spent on the phone drop from as much as two hours to as low as 15 minutes.
With WELL, Eisenhower Health saw a 40% reduction in no-shows and a 23% growth in appointment confirmations.
With all the extra time, Mark Steffen Chief Administrative Officer, Primary and Specialty Care Clinics said, “We can focus our care team on more patient-focused activities and follow-up.”
The Tiburcio Vazquez Health Center (TVHC) caters to 115,000 patients, a large proportion of which are Hispanic. The language barrier was making it difficult for TVHC physicians to connect with such a large volume of patients, resulting in high patient no-show rates and lost revenue. By implementing WELL Health, TVHC overcame the language barrier issue.
TVHC saw its no-show rate drop by 20%. Confirmed bookings skyrocketed from 25% to 80%.
WELL “has given us a better way to talk to our patients, an easier, more efficient way to reach out to patients, and a better way to handle scheduling,” said Caleb Sandford, TVHC Chief Operations Officer.
Improve Patient Response to Critical Vaccination Programs
Improve Patient Response to Vaccination Programs
