Identifying the problem
Helse Vest RHF needed to improve efficiency, reduce response times and provide quicker advice to calling patients by centralising the remaining parts of their regionalised digital platform to be managed by the central ICT team – Helse Vest IKT.
Helse Vest RHF recognised that patient access and care coordination were being negatively impacted by the disparate technologies used by many of its hospitals and reporting limitations that provided limited visibility into contact centre workflows. Helse Vest RHF also realised that it needed to address their staffing procedures and call centre workflow redundancies that existed in each healthcare facility.
In addition, Helse Vest had to comply with Norway’s National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health and Social Services mandate that ensures patients receive quick and timely responses to their healthcare inquiries. At Helse Bergen, Helse Vest RHF’s largest hospital, roughly every third patient call was abandoned due to long waiting times. Helse Vest knew that to comply with the government mandate, it needed to streamline its disparate communications platforms and implement a patient-centric approach to improving patient care quality.
Meeting the patient at the centre mandate
Helse Vest RHF knew that their existing decentralised communication systems were unable to support their future digital transformation needs. However, Helse Vest RHF recognised that increasing their technology and telecom footprint might create additional, unforeseen technology gaps.
To leverage their existing solutions and minimise disruption to their contact centre and patient communications, Helse Vest RHF needed a scalable and sustainable solution across their entire regional hospital ecosystem. They needed deep contact centre reporting capabilities to track call centre workflows and integrate and benchmark KPIs. Ultimately, the ideal solution needed to provide deep, quantitative data analytics so Helse Vest RHF could demonstrate how and when they were reducing patient hold times.
Achieving patient centric healthcare
To guage the initiative’s success, Helse Vest RHF manually tracked call centre calls before and after the implementation and created guidelines for the new solution’s automated reports. The Avaya Aura Contact Centre reports quantifiably demonstrated that on average, 20 percent more calls were being answered. When some of the calls were routed to a generic front desk, Helse Vest saw another 20 percent decrease in calls being triaged to the appropriate care team.
By implementing Avaya’s Unified IP-based technology platform with its powerful VoIP features and simple configuration, Helse Vest IKT now has access to faster and easier remote support and troubleshooting. With Avaya, they streamlined their IP platform, improved operational measurements, met KPIs, and reduced patient wait times.
Leveraging existing technologies to improve patient coordination was paramount for Helse Vest RHF and, with Avaya’s technology, Helse Vest RHF surpassed the requirements of the National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health and Social Services Mandate.
“We saw different technologies increasingly merging into each other, and recognised that a change in our technology was needed to reap the full benefits of a centralised IP platform,” John Arne Lillestøl, Head of Section Telecom at Helse Vest IKT.
