Social networking has reached the mainstream. Healthcare payers and providers are using this new medium as a marketing tool to improve their responsiveness to customer comments and requests.

Patients as customers want to communicate using media of their preference. Instant messaging and social media tools, like Facebook, are the vehicle of choice for the younger generation.

The “standard” call center/contact center agent-based approach does not meet the user’s expectation of a multi-media (e.g., SMS and chat and email) dialogue. The healthcare industry, as a whole, has been slow to adopt to these new forms of communications. The move towards proactive wellness management and patient/customer satisfaction dictates communication on the “customer’s terms” to be effective.

Solution

Dynamic Communication Processing, from Cross Telecom, enables the acquisition, transport, and delivery of information using the device(s) and media determined by the user to be most convenient at any point in time.

Using closed loop communication services, DCP provides comprehensive management, tracking and media conversion facilities to assure information is delivered in real-time to the right person at the right time.

Benefits

• Highly customized messages result in a unique patient/customer experience.
• Multi-channel automated notifications reduce cost and while increasing opportunity to interact and reinforce
  appropriate customer behavior – resulting in better outcomes.
• Proactive communication strategies can be executed based on demographics, time and (patient) need – driving effectiveness.

Example

Proactive Patient/Customer Management: A healthcare provider is working to reduce post-op complications for their ambulatory surgical centers. They had instituted an advice-nurse service to respond to patient questions and to proactively follow-up. The healthcare provider has discovered the service to be adequate, but it is costly (e.g. high labor costs) and their effectiveness with some patients (e.g. between the ages of 25 – 40) is low. By evolving the Call Center to a Context Center, the healthcare provider can incorporate far more than live voice services (staffed by an expensive nursing resource.) The incorporation of custom, proactive emails and SMS along with social media messaging enables the healthcare provider to proactively reach a much larger patient/customer community than can be accomplished with simple telephone calls. All of this being accomplished without additional staffing resources. Furthermore, the ability to customize messages to more accurately reflect the patient’s post-op needs and respond in near real-time has a profound impact on the patient’s follow-up care and satisfaction.