(This article was originally published in
Healthcare Call Center Times in January 2021.)
ATLANTA, GA—Online Scheduling, live chat, and chatbots are increasing on healthcare websites while online class/event registration and online class/event payment are down, according to the recently released Fifth Annual State of Digital Marketing in Healthcare Report. The report was produced by the Atlanta-based Greystone.Net and the Orland Park, Illinois-based Klein & Partners.
For this study, 271 healthcare marketers and digital professionals were surveyed from various healthcare organizations—from small community hospitals, academic medical centers, children’s hospitals and large health systems with multiple sites.
The emergence of online scheduling can impact the scheduling call center by, perhaps, offloading a certain amount of calls. This, in turn, can allow the scheduling call center to concentrate on more complex scheduling issues. So, tracking the increase of online scheduling is important for scheduling call center leadership to understand. With that said, online scheduling through the EMR has increased from 36 percent of respondents in 2018 to 40 percent of respondents in 2019. Online appointment scheduling via a tool like ZocDoc, etc. has increased from 29 percent in 2018 to 35 percent in 2019.
The call center may be the place within the healthcare organization where live chat through the website takes place. With that said, live chat has increased from 16 percent of respondents in 2018 to 18 percent of respondents in 2019. The use of chatbots on the website has increased from 5 percent in 2018 to 11 percent in 2019.
Class and event registration at one time in the distant past was predominantly done via phone calls into the call center. As more and more interactive web applications were developed, some of this activity gravitated to the web, therefore freeing the call center to focus on other things. There seems to be some softening in this activity at this time. According to the survey, in 2018, 64 percent of respondents offered online class/event registration and 52 percent offered online class/event payment. By 2019, this had declined to 57 percent of respondents offering online class/event registration and 40 percent of respondents offering online class/event payment.
Another part of the survey focuses on mobile apps, of which 49 percent of respondents had one for consumers in 2019. Those having mobile apps answered a question on the main purposes of their app. Of the responses of interest to healthcare call centers are: looking up a doctor, 62 percent; find-a-doc, 60 percent; making doctor appointment, 55 percent; virtual e-visit, 45 percent; and symptom info at 25 percent.