It’s time for your hospital's C-suite to change their tune about the hospital contact center. Instead of seeing it as a cost center, they need to see it as an investment center.

Healthcare workers are adept at handling emergent situations. We don’t cower when faced with crisis. We rally, pivot and adapt until the crisis is over. When it is safe to resume “normal,” we reverse pivot. Safe where we started, we move ahead.

At Michigan Medicine, the standard goal for each call center is to answer at least 80 percent of inbound calls within 30 seconds. Meaning, each center strives to maintain an 80 percent service level and a sub-30-second average speed of answer (ASA). Although this standard had not been met for many years by the Radiology Call Center, the COVID-19 pandemic exasperated it even more.

The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) technology into contact center quality assurance processes is nothing short of transformational. It is of particular value to healthcare contact centers, that must comply with high standards of performance and strict regulatory requirements.

Prior to the pandemic, the University of Miami Medical System was experiencing a surge in ambulatory and acute care visits. The contact center in place was developed more than 10 years prior to these circumstances and therefore not designed to accommodate the over 1500 healthcare providers and their respective patient networks effectively and efficiently on a yearly basis.

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) has been around for at least a couple of decades. However, the advent of smart devices—smartphones, smartwatches, etc.—brought about new capabilities and technology that have increased the quality and availability of remote monitoring.

In the blink of an eye, every person in the world had their world turned upside down by the pandemic in 2020.

At the start of COVID-19, Gina Minas, director of access at Northwestern Medicine, was faced with some daunting numbers: Each year, her call center team handles 7.6 million calls. She has 260 agents. With only 20 percent of her staff already working from home before COVID-19, she had only seven days to transition 80 percent of her staff to a WFH environment.