Scaling Healthcare Patient Communications

Many healthcare institutions are faced with a sudden and dramatic increase in patients without the help of additional resources. They have the same number of doctors and nurses on staff but are now dealing with hundreds of thousands of inquiries due to the pandemic. So how do you streamline your operations to handle this increase, all while enabling remote care teams to provide telehealth services? L.A. County Department of Health Services faced this very scenario and knew they had to scale their contact center fast in order to meet demand.

Utilizing a cloud-based contact center

L.A. County Department of Health Services started using Intermedia’s Cloud Contact Center back in 2012 to help improve the level and quality of communication between staff and patients. One issue that they wanted to tackle right away was the high rate of broken patient appointments. While working with their care team, Intermedia designed an omni-channel dynamic notification patient contact protocol. Which resulted in a 21% decrease in broken appointments and a drastic improvement on no show rates, all with no interruptions to regular operations.

Now, with the spike in patient inquiries due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the care team was dealing with a number of challenges in their new remote work setting, including sending out updates to patients on a much larger scale, automating reminder calls, and adding bilingual options in their communications. And all of these were addressed in just thirty-six hours.

“Intermedia is once again there for us, helping additional teams and departments to work remotely, enabling our TeleHealth capabilities, and keeping our patients updated with a robust dynamic notification system.” Said, Richard Rodriguez, L.A. County Department of Health Services Operations Manager – Patient Access Division

The department is relying on Intermedia Contact Center to:

• Send out frequent and timely communications to patients regarding COVID-19 updates
• Equip care teams to deliver, without disruption, TeleHealth services while working remotely
• Provide a cost-effective patient reminder call feature that’s easy to use
• Reduce the stress associated with placing calls during scheduled hours

Developed on a proprietary platform, Intermedia Contact Center is available as both a standalone service as well as part of an integrated bundle with the all-in-one business phone and communications solution Intermedia Unite^TM.

Intermedia’s three contact center packages include:

• Intermedia Contact Center Express: intended for small businesses looking for a simple, yet sophisticated suite of call handling and routing features to provide a superior customer experience at a fraction of the cost of traditional offerings.
• Intermedia Contact Center Pro: offers all the power of Express, plus advanced functionality such as the ability to add omni-channel capabilities along with smart call routing, historical reporting, and real-time insights for a more comprehensive contact center solution.
• Intermedia Contact Center Elite: designed to satisfy the needs of organizations with more complex contact center requirements and those that want custom-tailored solutions. Building on the Pro offering, Elite features include a full omni-channel environment, with custom CRM integrations, self-service IVRs, outbound notification campaigns, advanced QA features, and more.

To learn more about how the L.A. County Department of Health Services is utilizing Intermedia Contact Center, we invite you to read the full case study.

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.