Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

December 07, 2009

Group Health Cooperative Improves Patient Care with Avaya Contact Center Solution

By Susan J. Campbell

TMCnet Contributing Editor

Group Health Cooperative, a consumer-governed, non-profit health care system, has selected Avaya contact center solutions in an effort to drive greater efficiencies and faster service in their patient service operations, according to company officials.

Prior to the implementation of the new contact center solution, it could take as much as nine hours to resolve patient issues through multiple phone calls. Such inefficiency is the result of the previous system’s inability to route information quickly and appropriately to the right resource.

The company serves more than 600,000 people in Washington State and Idaho. Avaya (News - Alert) was chosen in order to help Group Health Cooperative to deliver better health care service while cutting costs in the process, company officials said.

To drive these initiatives, Group Health Cooperative implemented an Avaya Communication Manager IP telephony platform to reduce the time it takes to resolve client issues by as much as 90 percent.

With the implementation of the Avaya contact center solution, Group Health was not only able to enhance routing capabilities, it was also able to increase first call resolution of patient problems from 7 percent to 72 percent compared to the prior year.

Group Health was also searching for better ways to manage call volumes, which could easily reach 3,500 inbound patient calls a day. Avaya and its Platinum partner NACR helped the company to targeted three key areas: improving call routing and first call resolution; computer telephony integration to enable screen pops of patient records; and medication adherence and disease management.

“How many people have their physician actually answer the phone when they call their clinic?” asked Ernie Hood, chief information officer, in a statement. “At Group Health this is becoming an everyday occurrence made possible by this technology and the result is better care for the patient and less time wasted on phone tag (News - Alert).”

The Avaya Voice Portal was also deployed by Group Health in order to allow patients to more quickly connect directly to their personal care teams. This application serves as the umbrella application for self-service and automation, while also providing customers with expected wait times and their queue position.

In addition to enjoying improved efficiency, Group Health drives productivity from the customized reporting module that provides information on the end-to-end call experience on a call-by-call basis. Managers can now identify problem points to take immediate action to correct any issues.

Avaya continues to demonstrate a strong performance in the communications industry. It was recently included in the Group Enterprise Telephony Quarterly Report. The Dell'Oro Group reported that the Unified Communications (News - Alert) market grew in the third quarter of 2009. More than 70 percent of the reported vendors contributed to the market’s quarterly growth. The top two Unified Communications vendors, Avaya and Cisco, have each posted double digit revenue gains over the second quarter of 2009.

Avaya also recently announced that it has come out with the one-X Agent contact center desktop application suite, which features a user interface that lets agents better manage multiple customer and expert interactions simultaneously. This helps simplify work item management for the agents, while driving more first call resolutions.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Erin Harrison

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