One of the Southeast region’s largest healthcare providers that serves the Carolinas at four hospitals and more than 60 outpatient locations with a number of specializations – including family medicine, orthopedics, cancer care, surgical services, and many more – was beginning to feel the impact of COVID-19 across their facilities and needed to act quickly.
As with most healthcare organizations, their employees were significantly affected and became overwhelmed with growing call volumes. As scheduling COVID-19 vaccinations became the priority, routine procedure booking fell by the wayside.
The healthcare provider knew they needed to outsource in order to keep up with customer demand and required a partner with the resource capacity and healthcare IT expertise to assist in this endeavor. Knowing they could not sacrifice excellent patient support – all while remaining HIPAA compliant and adhering to COVID-19 health and safety protocols – they engaged Buchanan to help.
To help manage the volume of calls, Buchanan proposed a call center solution that was primarily focused on scheduling patient procedures such as ultrasounds, mammograms, bone density scans, EKGs, pulmonary function tests, and more via outbound calling services. Knowing the healthcare provider’s internal teams were taxed with navigating the COVID-19 crisis, Buchanan’s analysts took ownership of the backlog list and were able re-engage with patients to keep routine visits on track, ensuring patient satisfaction and increased revenue for the customer.
When COVID-19 cases began to decline and the demand for vaccination appointments lessened, the healthcare provider was able to resume normal operations and no longer needed supplemental outbound call support. However, their IT department was impressed with the support Buchanan was able to provide throughout the pandemic and wanted to leverage Buchanan’s services to provide technical support for their eCW patient portal.
The Buchanan team has since been providing level 1 support via phone and email for all patient portal inquiries, including – but not limited to – login issues, registration, password resets, and general troubleshooting.
Having a dedicated partner to oversee and manage their patient portal support continues to make significant business impacts, as the customer experienced a 50% reduction in the time spent resolving tickets and improved customer satisfaction.
With Buchanan’s support, the healthcare provider has been able to consistently maintain a 100% first-level resolution rate month over month for its users. Not only does this ensure patient requests are addressed in a timely manner, but because tickets aren’t being escalated to the customer’s internal IT team, their staff has more capacity to focus on strategic initiatives.
This success is reflected in the numbers – for 12 consecutive months, the team has achieved a 95% + customer satisfaction score, far surpassing our benchmark of 85%. In addition, as ticket volumes continued to increase, Buchanan restructured and scaled their support model to accommodate this growth, leading to significant per-ticket cost savings for the customer.
Lastly, Buchanan’s partnership has brought forth innovative solutions that will help the customer evolve and adapt in the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare technology.
Learn more about the specific IT solutions deployed & their outcomes
