eBook

THE HEALTHCARE PROVIDER’S GUIDE TO

RESOURCEMANAGEMENT

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYAs healthcare providers, you face the daunting task of providing high-quality care to patients, a well-run establishment for personnel, and an efficient and effective business for management or shareholders. This is no small feat.

Fortunately, your organization can implement the same workforce optimization and sophisticated task management solutions used by thousands of enterprises to improve both their customer experience (CX) and their efficiency.

For healthcare providers, this means:

• More efficient use of doctors and other high-cost medical personnel by:

• Preserving the context and content of all interactions between doctor and patient—regardless of the communication channel

• Vastly improving scheduling and task management to reduce wasted time

• Optimized scheduling of hospital beds and clinical rooms (key to profitability) can be improved with real-time visibility into beds that are available now or will be in the near future

The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Resource Management is one in a three-part series of eBooks designed to show how an omnichannel engagement center can significantly improve your healthcare business. Other titles in the series include:

• The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Omnichannel Customer Experience

• The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Revenue and Compliance Management

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

EFFICIENCY OPPORTUNITIES FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS You have to manage complex operations comprising varied and distributed pieces. However, efficiencies can be uncovered—and technology can help you find them.

Let’s examine three key areas where efficiency can be improved:

WORK ITEM ROUTING

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

FACILITIES MANAGEMENT

#1WORK ITEM ROUTING

Multiple interactions take place between all parties involved in healthcare—patient, provider, and payer—as well as ancillary participants and vendors such as outpatient clinics, pharmacies, and medical equipment suppliers. Being able to efficiently and effectively route tasks to those most appropriate to complete them, and efficiently distribute or balance the workload will markedly improve your operations.

When all tasks, regardless of communication channel (calls, email, in-person appointments, etc.), are handled by a single routing platform, it’s easy to:

• Calculate staff utilization by channel.

• Forecast staffing needs by channel, season, illness, demographic, etc.

Healthcare providers use various methods of task routing and workload management. Some segments, like appointment scheduling, are automated. Others, such as the way email is processed, are more ad hoc. The goal should be to accurately inventory all work that needs to be done, assign it a priority, and route it to the most appropriate resource equipped with the tools to respond.

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

#1 WORK ITEM ROUTING

Assignment and Prioritization

Each interaction type could follow a “triage” process. Conditions categorized as “expectant” or “immediate” are routed to emergency or urgent care. Those classified as “delayed” or “minor” are handled by the primary care physician. Each interaction could also have a numeric value attached to provide ranking within a category based on patient history and the severity of the need.

As interactions are created and categorized, they can then be routed to the most appropriate, available resource. Notification to the resource (physician, nurse, administrator) could be sent via smartphone or tablet, with an option to ignore or delay response in the event that a more pressing issue needs attention. If that were to happen, the interaction would be re-routed to the new most appropriate resource.

Each event handled by the task routing solution is tracked by its interaction channel for accurate classification, as well as by task duration and patient outcome, to ensure that the right amount of time is allocated to similar events in the future. An accommodation could also be made for a number of urgent, unscheduled events.

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

#1 WORK ITEM ROUTING

Assignment and Prioritization (cont’d)

To provide a complete picture of productivity, all tasks handled by a physician (for example) could be accounted for by:

• Channel (face-to-face, inbound/outbound voice, email, web, chat, video, etc.)

• Season (cold/flu, back-to-school, etc.)

• Illness (chronic, health maintenance, etc.)

• Demographic (age, ethnicity, etc.)

Then, the provider could:

• Filter, prioritize, and push the next most important patient to the most appropriate resource (physician, physician assistant, nurse, etc.)

• Predict resource requirements by channel

• Forecast, schedule, and track events and resources

• Link productivity to compensation

Eventually, healthcare delivery could develop pricing models based on communication channel. For patients who use treatment options without seeing a doctor, plans could offer lower cost of access. These types of plans usually allow a certain number of escalations per year for free, then levy a fee thereafter.

#2RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Healthcare providers typically have three knowledge workers in the back office supporting every front-office worker. It can be quite a challenge for operations leaders to manage back-office workers the same way they manage agents in the contact center, largely because of the amount of work in the back office that is manual and off-queue.

Similarly, it’s tough to manage resources who have historically engaged with patients in person (physicians and nurses). These engagement models are notoriously difficult to extend to tasks, like email, that don’t take place in real time. However, recent developments now make it possible to identify back-office and off-queue tasks and route them just as you would voice calls.

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

#2 RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Workforce Management Capabilities

Advanced workforce management tools make it possible for staff planners to juggle all activity in voice and non-voice channels. This allows resources to move seamlessly between tasks and channels throughout the day. These same capabilities extend beyond the contact center to agents, nurses, and physicians working remotely—thus optimizing service and minimizing costs.

Workforce Optimization Capabilities

Regardless of staff location or interaction channel, workforce optimization tools aim to forecast, schedule, and track activities. When agents or administrative staff are interacting with live customers, the interactions are usually driven by inbound and outbound call activity that’s handled by the phone system. But off-queue activities are equally important, and many patients use multiple channels to engage. Workforce optimization enables your staff to accept work from all channels used by a patient.

This becomes especially important in determining compensation for highly paid employees who interact with patients across multiple channels throughout the day. To reward top performers, some healthcare providers are considering compensation models that differentiate between interaction types, volumes, response times, and outcomes. The idea is to encourage doctors to meet with patients for more than a few minutes during an office visit and to also compensate them, or nurse coordinators, for communicating with patients by phone and email—even outside of normal office hours. Doctors could also be compensated for helping patients manage chronic conditions and would be encouraged to transmit prescriptions electronically.

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

#2 RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

Reporting and Performance Tools

A range of performance management tools is needed for visibility into real-time events as well as historical performance. These tools calculate workload, identify needed skills, determine training requirements, and help you manage the workforce that’s performing the tasks.

The reporting tools used for performance management present information in historical and real-time format for all resources involved in direct patient interactions, regardless of their location. Beyond interactions with live agents, reporting tools also consider patient interactions handled in clinics and hospitals for phone, email, web, chat, SMS, video, and work items. These metrics are critical to your organization’s sustainability and long-term growth.

#3FACILITIES MANAGEMENT Hospitals make money when beds are occupied. This poses at least two big challenges for hospital administrators:

• Managing the pipeline to achieve optimal occupancy levels

• Reducing avoidable readmissions

Managing the pipeline requires real-time knowledge of the beds that are available, as well as those likely to become available within the next 24 hours. One way to accomplish this is to understand all of the events linked to patient discharge and ensure they are acted on in a timely manner.

For example, it’s one thing to inquire if transport is available to take a patient home or to an outpatient care facility. It’s quite another to know that the transportation has been scheduled. If the transportation fails to show up on time, the patient can’t be discharged, and the bed won’t be available for the next patient.

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

#3 FACILITIES MANAGEMENT

Workload Distribution

Each of these decision points will likely spawn a series of activities involving multiple entities as well as the patient and their family. The only way to ensure each stakeholder is aware of their responsibilities is to implement a workload distribution system for tracking, prioritizing, and routing tasks.

As with discharge planning, proper patient care after discharge can dramatically reduce the odds of re-admission. Proper scheduling and monitoring of home health services may allow patients—who would otherwise need non-acute residential care—to manage their transitional care needs at home.

If discharge to an outpatient setting is not appropriate, the discharge team must arrange transfer to another inpatient facility for ongoing care—a multi-step activity as well.

SLA Management

As with pipeline control, the only way to make sure all parties understand their responsibilities after patient discharge or transfer is by establishing SLAs for each critical juncture to measure actual performance against the goal of minimizing readmissions.

SLA management will, in turn, shape operational procedures—for example, scheduling regular outbound calls to determine if a patient is taking the right dose of medication at the right time and that they’re performing self-care, eating properly, and following up with their providers. SLA monitoring can feed the closed-loop process improvement and may provide an early warning for patients at high risk of readmission.

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

CONCLUSIONGenesys, the world leader in customer engagement, would like to discuss how workforce and workload optimization, analytics, and an omnichannel communication strategy can help you gain efficiencies and improve your patient and customer experience. Visit us at www.genesys.com.

Additional Resources

For more insights into CX for healthcare providers, check out the other two eBooks in this series:

• The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Omnichannel Customer Experience

• The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Revenue and Compliance Management

TAKE YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE TO THE NEXT LEVEL Whether your goal is to modernize your Contact Center, increase workforce quality and efficiency or drive better customer experiences, Genesys offers an open and scalable platform that efficiently fits into your existing enterprise architecture and reduces total cost of ownership.

Industry leaders have achieved amazing results with the Genesys Customer Experience Platform such as:

Increase in Revenue Increase in Agent Productivity Increase in First Call Resolution (FCR)

Increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Get Started Request a Demo Learn More

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation

30% 50% 70% 25%

Genesys, the world’s #1 Customer Experience Platform, empowers companies to create exceptional omnichannel experiences, journeys and relationships. For over 25 years, we have put the customer at the center of all we do, and we passionately believe that great customer engagement drives great business outcomes. Genesys is trusted by over 4,700 customers in 120 countries, to orchestrate over 24 billion contact center interactions per year in the cloud and on premises.

Copyright ©2016 Genesys. 2001 Junipero Serra Blvd., Daly City, CA 94014

All Rights reserved. Genesys and the Genesys logo are registered trademarks of Genesys. All other company names and logos may be registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective companies.

Website: www.genesys.com Contact Us: 1-888-GENESYS