Chronic care and hospice patients require immediate attention as their situation changes and when they experience often severe pain. Nurses and caregivers need the medications to administer to their charges with minimal waits. That means customer care must be delivered quickly, accurately, and effectively.
Established in 1996, excelleRx provides expert medication counseling and pharmaceutical distribution services for 70,000 hospice and chronic care patients throughout the United States. To support its 800 client hospice organizations, excelleRx employs more than 645 team members including 250 pharmaceutical care representatives who are highly trained pharmacists and pharmacy technicians.
Hospice Pharmacia, the primary business unit of excelleRx, aims to change the way medication is deployed, so that patients receive medications based on objective information instead of just habit or personal preference. More than just empty words, this dedication drives excelleRx to combine technology and clinical expertise to ensure that patients receive the appropriate medication for their unique situations. Hospice Pharmacia has two locations with 250 representatives.
The mission is to provide the best care and support to the nurses who use Hospice Pharmacia customer service involves making sure that nurses speak to the right representative at the right time. Many contact centers have seasonal spikes, which can be easier to staff for, but Hospice Pharmacia experiences spikes in call volume differently.
“Because our nurses are mobile, we see call spikes in the morning, at noon, and at the end day,” says excelleRx Vice President of IT Steve Lemak. “When our nurses call, it’s vital that they speak to an expert, not just a warm body. Our pharmaceutical care representatives are highly specialized, technical experts, so it isn’t easy to find temporary help, especially without overstaffing for the rest of the day.”
For a mobile workforce of nurses and other caregivers providing care to patients, being tied to a phone for even five minutes is unacceptable, so how do you optimize operations without sacrificing quality of service?
In 2006 Hospice Pharmacia deployed
Virtual Hold Technology (VHT)’s Concierge solution, integrated with the healthcare service’s Nortel Symposium switch. Highly experienced with Nortel, the VHT project team designed a custom integration for Hospice Pharmacia’s in-house and work-at-home agents, screen-pop and readerboard applications, and mobile workforce of nurses and caregivers.
The Virtual Hold solution for Hospice Pharmacia virtually eliminates hold time through Concierge. If there’s hold time when a nurse calls Hospice Pharmacia, Concierge informs the nurse of the estimated wait time and offers the nurse a choice: wait on hold or receive a callback when a pharmaceutical care representative is available.
Concierge keeps the nurse’s place in line, while the nurse hangs up and can move on with a busy day, secure in the knowledge that Hospice Pharmacia will call back when it said it would.
The results have been impressive. In two years two million minutes of hold time has been avoided. There has been a 58 percent reduction in abandons and a 54 percent boost in service levels during peaks.
With Virtual Hold, Hospice Pharmacia can ensure that nurses speak to the right person, the first time, within the time promised. And even though it can be difficult to estimate how long nurses will have to wait, Virtual Hold’s patented estimated wait time calculations result in Virtual Hold callbacks that are on time 99 percent of the time.
As nurses become more familiar in the Virtual Hold callback, utilization of the system continues to improve. In 2007, the Virtual Hold system treated 44 percent of callers and more than half of those opted for a Virtual Hold callback. In 2008, nearly 72 percent of callers offered a Virtual Hold callback accepted, which is no surprise given how busy Hospice Pharmacia’s nurses are.
“Virtual Hold is a great product that’s really helped us out,” says Lemak. “A nurse’s time is very valuable, and we could be losing more than business when they’re on hold.”
Brendan B. Read is HealthTechZone’s Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan’s articles, please visit his columnist page.Edited by
Jessica Kostek
