Leaders of the University of Florida and Shands Jacksonville initiative to have one team of highly-trained employees answering calls and setting appointments for various clinics and specialties were invited to speak last month as a national model for academic health centers.
Rita James, vice president of ambulatory services for University of Florida Jacksonville Healthcare, Inc., and Shands Jacksonville, and Cynthia Lannom, administrator for the Centralized Call Center, presented at the Medical Group Management Association annual meeting in Las Vegas.
James and Lannom spoke as part of a session on best practices for academic access centers and were joined on a panel by two representatives from the Mayo Clinic.
The Centralized Call Center opened in 2008 and rapidly expanded to accommodate communications for 70 UF and Shands clinics. The center, with more than 60 employees, now answers more than 1 million calls a year for the various sites.
Any call that would typically go into a clinic goes to the call center, Lannom said. That includes scheduling an appointment, facilitating referrals to and from physicians, obtaining authorization for prescription refills and other requests.
Call center employees also manage Patient Online, a customer portal where patients can request appointments through a secure website. Employees at the call center schedule the appointment and then send a confirmation message back to the patient.
“By handling these front-end functions, we really allow the clinics to focus on patient care,” James said.
Part of the success is having the call center workers off-site and free of distractions, James said.
“They are answering the phone, that is their sole focus,” James said. “While they are answering for a lot of different clinics, their focus is always with the customer on the phone.”
The push for a new system came after patient surveys showed room for improvement in telephone communication.
“They told us we didn’t answer on phones in a timely manner and, when we did answer, their needs weren’t being met,” Lannom said.
Executives spent 18 months visiting different centers and studying various models to come up with a plan.
Just one year after the new center opened, results from a survey this summer showed significant improvements across the board in customer satisfaction in services including ease of making an appointment, courtesy of the person taking the call and having the call answered promptly.
Satisfaction scores have increased consistently each year, Lannom said.
The center routinely exceeds national benchmarks for answering calls, Lannom said. The benchmark is answering 96 percent of calls (the center answers 99 percent) and answering 95 percent of calls within 30 seconds (the center’s rate is north of 97 percent).
All of the clinic locations maintain their regular telephone numbers, which allows a seamless relationship between patients and clinics. The location the patient calls shows up on the agents’ screen, so he or she will answer the phone and say the name of that clinic.
That allows Lannom to have statistics by location to show progress to those running the clinics and helps keep a more personal experience for the patient.
“We know that we’re the front door to our clinics for all of our patients,” Lannom said. “Our patients are our top priority and we take that very seriously.”