Improving Patient Care And Customer Service For the Healthcare Industry

Customer Inter@ction Solutions, Nov 2007 by Schelmetic, Tracey E

Who: Valley Radiologists, a large, full-service medical imaging center in Arizona. It has 10 locations and 45 radiologists, performs about 250,000 studies annually and plans to add locations and grow each year.

Before: The multiple locations were supported by a single call center. In 2004, its network infrastructure and telephone system were a mismatched amalgamation of several vendor products without consistent support, backup or easy internal communications. The radiologists did riot have access to the most-up-todate imaging technology, which compromised their ability to consult efficiendy with referring physicians and left open the possibility that a referring physician could send cases to other radiology practices, resulting in lost revenue. As a result, prospective patients calling into the call center were sometimes dropped, and hold times could extend to beyond 10 minutes. More importandy, patient care was sometimes offered at below optimal levels because radiologists did not have the means to easily access images, and often had to travel to multiple locations to review cases.

"Radiologists provide an important service to the medical community," said Cisco Senior Medical Informatics Director Dr. Danny Sands, M.D. "Radiology practices must, therefore, provide superior customer service to referring physicians and streamline the efficiency of their operations to maintain viability. That is why it is imperative that radiology practices have access to solutions like Connected Imaging, which eliminates reliance on expensive and outdated resources like film, and makes it easier to collaborate with referring physicians and improve both customer service and patient care."

Valley Radiologists was also saddled with recurring maintenance and service contracts that cost them more than $150,000 per year due to the multiple vendors and the patched together nature of the telecommunications and network systems.

The Solution

Valley Radiologists realized that they needed a clinically based solution built on a solid and reliable infrastructure. For this they chose the Cisco Connected Imaging solution built on its safe and secure Medical-Grade Network. Connected Imaging delivers imaging as a service from the Medical-Grade Network using Cisco Unified Communications and advanced data center technologies.

Cisco Connected Imaging aligned with Philips iSite Picture Archive & Communication System (PACS) on the Valley Radiologists imaging solution. Together, Cisco and Philips helped Valley Radiologists eliminate film and render patient or physician geography a non-issue. This became the path to providing superior patient care while protecting privacy.

The Cisco Connected Imaging solution helps radiologists interpret image study and collaborate with referring physicians in realtime, facilitating rapid diagnosis and treatment of patients. It accelerated the elimination of the costs and delays associated with traditional film imaging.

"Valley Radiologists wanted to manage costs by improving patient workflow and staff overhead," says Todd Wingler, the Cisco Account Manager. "For Phase One, Valley built a data center that also housed a call center with 25 agents to centralize patient scheduling and workflow. For Phase 2, Valley purchased a Cisco Unified Communications and Connected Imaging solution. By connecting the imaging systems at the different sites, radiologists at multiple sites are able to balance their workload and collaborate more effectively."

The Results: Cisco worked with its partner, local telecommunications vendor Qwest, on the Valley Radiologists core network as the company invested in a medical-grade network infrastructure upgrade that included new routers and new switches. "This phase helped us move three terabytes of data in May 2007 compared to traffic that measured in the hundreds of megabytes before the upgrade," Bennett says. "Our efficiency has increased by a factor of 10, and Cisco, Philips and Qwest were able to deliver an overall solution that has 99.99 percent uptime."

The new solution utilizing Cisco Contact Center Express helped improve customer service and led to greater job satisfaction with Valley Radiologists' staff. Efficiency has been increased, morale has improved and hold times have dropped from as high as seven minutes to nearly zero.

Precise measurement of patients lost due to outmoded equipment or lengthy waits in the call center are difficult, since many of those were never introduced in the practice. However, the measurable gains are impressive: Valley Radiologists was able to eliminate about $150,000 per year in recurring maintenance and service contract expenses and $60,000 annually in telephone-system related expense. According to Bennett, another major savings was that the new system "stopped the losses in terms of immeasurable business lost through dropped calls and some consultations that may not have occurred." New infrastructure and communications solutions paid for themselves within 14 months with just the measurable savings.