COSMOCOM WHITEPAPER SERIES

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1 Stephen R. Kowarsky COSMOCOM WHITEPAPER SERIES COULD THE SIMPLE TELEPHONE BE THE BIG HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGH OF THE NEXT DECADE? INNOVATIVE HEALTHCARE APPLICATIONS WITH IP CONTACT CENTER TECHNOLOGY Stephen R. Kowarsky, EVP CosmoCom, Inc. November 2009 USA UK France Germany Japan Hong Kong Israel India Brazil Taiwan Singapore CosmoCom Headquarters 121 Broad Hollow Rd. Melville, NY Tel: Fax: Worldwide office locations and contact information at :

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3 Healthcare COULD THE SIMPLE TELEPHONE BE THE BIG HEALTHCARE TECHNOLOGY contact center BREAKTHROUGH OF THE NEXT DECADE? solutions INNOVATIVE HEALTHCARE APPLICATIONS WITH IP CONTACT CENTER TECHNOLOGY Executive Summary Healthcare providers are increasingly discovering that IP contact center technology can be a critical tool for providing patients with unprecedented and cost-effective access to superior healthcare services. At the same time, contact center-based healthcare applications enable providers to extend their services to growing numbers of patients. With the right IP contact center platform, healthcare providers can: resolve patient inquiries swiftly and efficiently; implement effective patient education programs; enhance quality and availability of healthcare services; improve the overall patient experience and loyalty. This white paper will take a high-level look at how IP contact center technology is improving healthcare today and will offer examples of how it can further enhance communications between patients and providers for better overall outcomes. CosmoCom White Paper: Healthcare Contact Center Technology 1

4 Optimize Healthcare with an IP Contact Center Platform The term contact center (or call center) evokes an image of a roomful of cubicles with many people making or receiving calls. But today s contact center technologies replace those stereotypes with visions of unified communication among people in any number of locations. Businesses of all types are realizing the cost savings and customer satisfaction benefits associated with IP contact center technology, and this is especially true in the healthcare industry. With an IP contact center platform, many healthcare applications can be delivered over any electronic communication channel, by live healthcare representatives or by automated systems. Employees and systems can reside across the region or the globe, and still be virtually unified via the IP network. An IP contact center platform that supports multiple healthcare applications concurrently, in a multi-tenant environment, can empower tenants to share and leverage: Multi-tenancy allows an enterprise to host multiple organizations on a single system, where each organization can administer its own Virtual Contact Center (VCC) while maintaining data privacy from other VCCs hosted on the same system. back-end enterprise software applications such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), billing, scheduling, or Electronic Health Records (EHR) a distributed labor pool predictive dialing capabilities that optimize the productivity of healthcare professionals and the patient experience applications that streamline delivery of critical healthcare services and improve the quality of patient services Many other benefits accrue to providers who support multiple healthcare applications on a single IP contact center platform. These include: geographically distributed employees: by providing the full functionality of the platform and all capabilities of the various applications to employees wherever they work, potential labor pool size can be broadened multiple communication channels: any medium required for any application telephone, , video, Web, or instant messaging can be managed through a single interface multiple back-end applications: both centralized and departmental resources can be leveraged to ensure the highest quality of service and to meet criteria for project funding such as the meaningful use criteria required to receive funding related to the US government programs Leveraging the Intersection of Healthcare and IP Contact Center Technology A growing number of healthcare applications are being enabled -- or greatly enhanced -- by delivery over an IP contact center platform. Delivery of health-related services and information via telecommunication technologies is known as telehealth or telemedicine. Telehealth is a growing trend because many studies have confirmed its ability to enhance the quality, availability, and cost of care. The telehealth of today and tomorrow encompasses much more than home monitoring systems and video conferences with doctors. In some patient monitoring studies where patients used only a telephone to report their health status, the results were better than those in studies that relied on remote devices. A growing number of healthcare applications are being enabled or enhanced by over the use of an IP contact center platform. The following examples illustrate this rapidly evolving family of applications. CosmoCom White Paper: Healthcare Contact Center Technology 2

5 Unifying Patient-Provider Communications To improve responsiveness to patients, increase operational efficiency, and control overhead costs, many healthcare providers are seeking ways to consolidate their communication systems. Having many decentralized systems make people inefficient and makes the patient experience inconsistent. An IP contact center platform can resolve these issues by unifying all clinical, professional office, and administrative contact functions on a single, centrally managed infrastructure. With one unified communication system, consistent reports are available with divisional and consolidated views, standard policies apply across applications, and all backup and security can be efficient and effective. In addition, with centralized databases and shared access to critical back-end applications, employee productivity and patient satisfaction improve. IP contact center technology enables intelligent queuing and routing of inbound and outbound contacts such as telephone calls, web chats, and s, while also supporting full interoperability of healthcare applications with EHR, CRM, scheduling, billing, and other business applications. With the right technology, healthcare providers can create and support any number of virtual contact centers of any size on a single platform, with unified transaction recording, reporting, and administration. At the same time, such technology enables each healthcare application, location or entity to maintain complete autonomy, and with the security required by health information privacy regulations. The combined application of these technologies to improve patient communications and outcomes is what we call Unified Patient Provider Communications (UPPC). Nurse Triage Nurse Triage and its rare cousin Dial-a-Doctor are other healthcare applications that can be improved with an IP contact center. Most traditional implementations of this type of application are not linked to any other patient service. As a result, at the end of a call, the patient is on their own to implement the guidance. If the advice is to seek health coaching, or visit a specialist s office, the patient must identify the appropriate healthcare provider, call for an appointment, and repeat their symptoms and history. With an IP Contact Center, the initial information gathering can be automated by an Interactive Voice Reponse system, and the nurse or doctor who receives the call can also view patient information in a screen pop. The nurse or doctor handling the call can route both the call and the information obtained during the call to the right provider. Related records and data be screen-popped with the call for more efficient appointment scheduling and/or further consultation. An IP contact center platform makes such streamlined interaction possible. CosmoCom White Paper: Healthcare Contact Center Technology 3

6 PERS Personal Emergency Response Systems (PERS) present a similar example. These systems enable patients to either call for help by activating a single button device, or they automatically call for assistance on the basis of data transmitted by a worn medical device such as a heart rate monitor. In either case, when a call is initiated, an IP contact center By automatically making calls via the most effective delivery channel for the call type, patient care is optimized--and a more serious emergency may be averted. Health Coaching Predictive dialers eliminate the need for coaches to waste valuable time repeatedly dialing numbers that are busy, do not get answered, or are picked up by an answering machine or voic platform can route the call and all relevant information to a qualified healthcare professional with skills relevant to that patient. At the same time, the platform could automatically initiate calls to friends or relatives, and to other healthcare providers, and deliver those calls to other appropriately skilled PERS agents for those conversations. By automatically making these calls via the most effective delivery channel for the call type, critical time is saved, complications prevented, and care optimized. Health coaching is another application that benefits from an IP contact center platform. Health coaching is an expanding practice in which professional health coaches work with individuals to increase their adherence to regimens associated with disease management, dietary plans, exercise programs, etc. According to the Wellness Council of America, one dollar invested in health coaching yields three dollars in savings. More than just an idle projection, this statement is supported by the market experiences of the largest healthcare providers, who have already turned to health coaching to reduce their costs and improve the health of their patients. With an IP contact center-based health coaching application, the productivity of coaches can be optimized in two ways. First, the platform can automatically dial participants in the program and only connect calls to coaches when a participant answers the phone. Predictive dialers eliminate the need for coaches to waste valuable time repeatedly dialing numbers that are busy, not answered, or picked up by an answering machine. Second, for both inbound and outbound calls, scripts guiding the conversations with the clients can be automatically tailored to the individual participant based on data stored in other back-end applications such as EHR or CRM. In this way, any coach can deliver the same high level of service in a consistent manner. An IP contact center platform can also benefit coaching applications by its ability to make staffing geographically transparent. Coaches can be located anywhere in a centralized contact center, across multiple centers, in different healthcare facilities, or even at home. In sum, the right IP contact center platform can enable the health coaching provider to boost productivity of coaches, improve their job satisfaction by eliminating rote tasks, improve return on investment, and, most importantly, ensure the best possible service levels for clients. While these benefits are certainly significant, perhaps even more impressive are the potential impacts of an IP contact center on device-free remote patient monitoring. CosmoCom White Paper: Healthcare Contact Center Technology 4

7 Remote Patient Monitoring Conventional remote patient monitoring (RPM) relies on a wide variety of devices that either automatically upload data or require a patient to call in and report on read-outs from a device. The benefits of RPM are substantial. In a 2009 report, the New England Healthcare Institute projected savings of $6.4 billion annually in the United States if RPM were used for the management of chronic heart failure. Somewhat ironically, the report also indicated that RPM devices are a key barrier to achieving these savings. Fortunately, a new approach called device-free RPM that does not rely on any patient devices except for a telephone is now proven as an alternative. Most notably, in Iowa, a study was sponsored by the Iowa Medicaid Enterprise as well as a number of other healthcare entities in that state. The study involved 187 chronic heart failure patients who were asked to respond to an automated, telephone-based questionnaire each day. If a patient did not call by a certain hour, the system initiated a call to the patient. A care coordinator monitored responses via exception reporting and personally followed up if necessary. Results were nothing short of profound: heart failure admits were down 89.8 percent during the study, and all cause admits were down 60 percent. With results like these, device-free RPM may well become a key application to leveraging the great benefits of IP contact center technology in healthcare. The contact center is the ideal infrastructure not only to support the interactive voice response (IVR) system required to administer the questionnaires, but also to route the calls immediately to an appropriate caregiver based on responses, and initiate related outbound calls by care coordinators if appropriate. Unified Patient Provider Communication IP contact center technology is at the core of Unified Patient Provider Communications (UPPC). UPPC unifies the varied operations, provider employee locations, functions, communication channels and healthcare applications on a single consolidated platform. Healthcare providers can create a UPPC environment by linking all individual applications such as those discussed above into a single framework with the EHR as its backbone. As a result, when a patient contacts a provider, the right information is automatically presented to the right healthcare professional at the right time--whether the inquiry pertains to PERS, Nurse Triage, RPM, Health Coaching, or just simple appointment setting. The obstacles to achieving the high level of integration that drives UPPC are not technical. Perhaps the primary issue is the inherent fragmentation of the healthcare system today. With a robust IP contact center, however, healthcare providers gain a critical tool that can help them overcome the disadvantages of this fragmentation to patient care and robust outcomes. In a UPPC framework, healthcare applications, media channels, and departmental applications are unified by a common communication infrastructure, and integrated to ensure the highest levels of patient care, satisfaction, and loyalty. UPPC begins with an IP contact center, but it ends with healthier patients. CosmoCom White Paper: Healthcare Contact Center Technology 5

8 Essential IP Contact Center Platform Functionality for Effective Healthcare Applications The technology for UPPC is available today in the most advanced IP Contact Center platforms. Providers must be sure to select a platform that offers the following capabilities: Support for multi-tenancy to ensure that all entities can leverage a shared pool of enterprise resources, while also enabling administrative independence for each entity Employee location independence that delivers its full capabilities to healthcare professionals wherever they are located, enabling providers to leverage their most skilled workers, while also boosting job satisfaction Advanced permissions and security to ensure compliance with privacy regulations, the contact center platform must be able to restrict access to information associated with patient health records Automated routing of telephone calls, web chats, s, etc, so that inbound and outbound contacts will reach the right person quickly and reliably Predictive dialing to ensure that only completed calls get put through to a staff member, and the campaign management systems associated with this capability to enable providers to determine who is called, when they are called, and what scripts are presented Interactive voice response (IVR) to automate inbound or outbound patient interactions Open software architecture that allows any back-end application to be easily and quickly integrated with contact center-driven healthcare applications High-capacity, high-availability, scalable architecture to ensure that this critical communications system is always available, and that all future growth requirements can easily be met without a forklift upgrade CosmoCom s IP contact center platform delivers this functionality--and more--with carrier class reliability. For more information, visit CosmoCom, the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0, excels in providing IP contact center platforms for enterprises with the largest and most complex requirements, consolidating multiple locations, onshore, offshore, and home-shore agents, formal and informal agents, captive and outsourced operations, multiple communication channels, and multiple applications. Organizations can obtain the full benefits of Consolidation 2.0 by deploying CosmoCom technology themselves or by working with a service provider that hosts CosmoCom platforms on a dedicated or shared basis. CosmoCom customers include Fortune-class enterprises throughout the world and service providers such as BT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange Business Services, Telefonica, NTT, Tata, PLDT, Verizon, and many others. CosmoCom is the most-selected provider of hosted contact center platforms to toptier telcos worldwide. For more information, please visit CosmoCom White Paper: Healthcare Contact Center Technology 6