Adding Specialties to the Contact Center: Reaping Rewards for Sharp-Reese Stealy Medical Centers

SAN DIEGO, CA—Historically, the contact center for the Sharp Reese-Stealy Medical Centers focused on primary care, radiology and lab scheduling. Specialties were not a part of the contact center.  That was problematic. “Our patient satisfaction scores indicated that patients were not happy,” says Kathy Hutchens, Vice President of Marketing and Patient Contact Center. “They had long waits on the phone. It was frustrating.”

To understand this problem more deeply, the organization did a Green Belt Project (Sharp Reese-Stealy is very much involved in Lean Six Sigma work), assigning an individual in the contact center to work on this. The goal was to look at the service provided to patients within the medical centers’ specialties. This individual talked to doctors and employees within the practices and observed what goes on regarding how the phones were answered and what transpired.

“Some of the departments had abandonment rates as high as 21 percent, while our contact center was 2 to 3 percent,” she says. “We wondered if this was because of average handle times but we found that they were about the same as the contact center.” The problem was that employees had to choose between answering the phone and helping the patients in front of them.

It would seem that the scheduling function would be so much more efficient if it were transferred from the specialties to the contact center. But in order to make that transition, there was a buy-in process that needed to happen. “Doctors were shocked at the wait time when we told them,” Hutchens says. “Patients might complain to the front desk or on their Press-Ganey surveys, but they wouldn’t tell the doctor.”  Understanding what was really going on with their patients trying to access their offices helped to create physician champions for the transition to the contact center.

As a part of this advocacy effort, the proposed change was taken to the board of directors of the medical group, which, once they saw the evidence, was quite supportive. 

Instead of hiring additional people for the contact center, Hutchens wanted to pull from the specialty practices. She felt that individuals in those practices involved in scheduling already were well trained. 

She asked for a total of three individuals to transfer over to work on the two specialties that would be the first to come into the contact center: neurology and podiatry. Each person was dedicated to one specialty, but cross-trained in the other specialty. Soon after, urology was added along with the relevant cross-training. These specialty schedulers have also been cross-trained in primary care and lab scheduling. 

For each specialty department coming in, it has taken about three months to successfully place them in the contact center. That’s because it has taken time to understand the specialty’s scheduling guidelines and put a knowledge management system in place.

Results have been immediate, she says. “We started in January 2019 and for one department their abandonment rate was 14 percent. Within a month it decreased to 1 to 2 percent.  The department with an abandonment rate of 21 percent went down to 2 percent.”