Providing excellent patient care in the healthcare landscape isn’t just about connecting people with doctors and specialists. It’s also important to have the right systems in place to ensure citizens can access the guidance and support they need when they need appointments or advice.
NHS 111 is a triaging service in the United Kingdom, designed to help people access urgent care support and advice when they need it most. The organisation helps with connecting patients to out-of-hours care providers for all forms of medical assistance. To ensure patients get the right support when they need it most, the NHS 111 team needs a fantastic CX strategy in place.
London’s NHS 111 service worked with Content Guru when its call numbers began to peak, in the development of a brand-new Patient Relationship Management solution. Here’s how Content Guru helped the NHS 111 London team transform customer care.
Creating a Strategy for Handling Customer Calls
NHS 111 London uses a combination of five different call handling providers for managing non-emergency calls, as well as nine data providers for storing patient details and records. This creates a complex ecosystem, with hundreds of pieces of information rapidly moving between each system during daily interactions.
Though complicated, the technology stack is necessary to ensure frontline teams can bring various sources of data together to support patients. Unfortunately, in the past, the technology leveraged by NHS 111 London made it difficult to deliver the best possible user experience.
Patients were commonly routed directly to any available call handler. The person the individual connected with would vary each time they called the support number, regardless of the gaps between calls. Unfortunately, this often meant patients were forced to repeat their symptoms, details, and any developments in their conditions with every conversation.
Not only did this process make matters more frustrating for patients, but it also led to extended average handling times for agents, and an extremely low rate of first contact resolution. Not to mention, patients suffered from a very inconsistent experience from their healthcare service.
The previous communication environment used by the NHS 111 team also meant it wasn’t possible to track repeat callers. This prevented professionals from monitoring the development of symptoms effectively. There was no way to prioritise support for a patient with seemingly worsening conditions, or accessing faster help for those with complex, pre-existing medical conditions.
Reporting was also a major issue for the team. With a complex commissioning environment in place for handling calls and patient information, the team couldn’t maintain a clear overview of healthcare processes throughout London. This made it much harder to track unusual spikes in symptoms within specific locations. The NHS 111 London group also didn’t have a clear view of provider performance, and lacked the ability to predict potential overflow events.
Finding a Solution to Communication Complexities
Faced with unpredictable and huge peaks in patient contact, particularly during the pandemic, the NHS 111 London service needed to implement a more streamlined solution for supporting patients. The company eventually turned to Content Guru for a solution.
Content Guru’s communication experts worked with NHS 111 London to build a new “PRM” (Patient Relationship Management) system. The technology securely connects various healthcare and medical information systems to assist with automating decisions about how to route crucial interactions.
Content Guru also integrated the “storm” contact centre with the core data providers, allowing employees to easily assess all information in a single, secure location. After implementation, independent evaluations of patient and user experience, effectiveness, and the economic impact of the new emergency and urgent care system revealed the PRM solution had massive benefits. Around 80% of all care plan callers were satisfied with the service.
Through Content Guru’s technology, NHS 111 London was able to set up an environment where patients could be quickly and conveniently routed to the most relevant healthcare professional straight away, based on their linked medical records. Clinical Advisors in the calls also automatically receive access to patient data when they pickup a call, which reduces painting waiting times significantly.
An additional benefit of the new technology was a better level of visibility for the NHS 111 team. The group now has a complete view of all of the healthcare operations throughout London using storm’s historical and real-time reporting features. This means the team can more easily keep track of unexpected symptom patterns, and geographical information surrounding epidemics.
The PRM technology further allows for the identification of people who have called the service repeatedly within a period of 96 hours. This means these callers can be automatically routed to the same NHS 111 provider they had spoken to in the past, with no need to repeat symptoms. Callers who call repeatedly with developing symptoms can be given a higher priority status, and forwarded to health advisors faster.
A New Level of Patient Care
The Content Guru ecosystem has provided NHS 111 London with a data-driven strategy for supporting patients like never before. The system even allows agents to create special patient notes for patients with complex and chronic health-term issues, so out-of-hours GPs can be informed of an entire patient’s history before starting a call.
The storm INTEGRATE solution accesses the “Special Patient Notes”, or SPNs, and allows NHS call handlers to immediately identify any potential issues a caller has. This also means patients with SPNs can be routed and diagnosed quickly. The storm technology even compresses SPNs to provide critical medical information to ambulances, improving patient outcomes on a massive scale.
Since implementing the Content Guru technology, NHS 111 London has further enhanced visibility into their processes through the storm “VIEW” solution. Dashboards within the storm contact centre allow users to monitor call volumes and symptom frequencies. What’s more, the technology can trigger alerts when unexpected spikes are detected, indicating the rise of an epidemic.
The PRM solution also leverages features like load balancing, to ensure calls are strategically sent to providers to enhance routing quality and reduce the chances of call failure. Team members can track this system through the VIEW application.
