Streamlining Healthcare Scheduling Through Omni-Channel Platforms

Fragmented patient scheduling can pose significant challenges for patients who require care from multiple medical offices.  The scheduling process can become confusing and frustrating, particularly when doctors’ offices have different scheduling protocols, health records systems, and limited availability. When coordinating appointments between multiple labs, care centers, and different doctors’ practices, proper communication becomes more essential than ever.

The lack of centralized communication can lead to:

• Increased miscommunication
• Duplicated engagement efforts
• Ineffective care coordination
• Negative impacts on patient experience
• Increased appointment no shows
• Last minute cancellations

When we rely on patients to perform communication between multiple doctors, there can be a risk of errors or misunderstanding

To overcome this, EDCi has developed a software solution that allows contact center applications to seamlessly integrate with Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems to streamline patient communication. This type of integration allows for more empathic communication to occur for appointment scheduling, bill pay, medication adherence, and other coordination of care needs. This solution is known as EHRConnect®.

The Solution: Centralizing Patient Communications

With EHRConnect, healthcare organizations can gather comprehensive knowledge on patients including:

• Access to patient medical records
• Appointment schedules (new and existing)
• Other critical components across multiple providers and practices

This integration enables healthcare organizations to focus on the entirety of the patient and assist in delivering an authentic, personalized approach to each patient. As a result, this significantly improves the patient's experience and reduces the burden on patients. As a bonus, care coordination and communication between medical offices is improved.

How EHRConnect®= is Different:

Alternative communication platforms have relied on an overload of outbound communication campaigns to notify patients when individual healthcare needs become required. EHRConnect approaches communication by utilizing predictive self-services – allowing for a single point of engagement instead of a flood of individual engagements.

When a patient enters a conversation using an AI bot flow, it will walk the patient through their appointments, medical bills, open care gaps, prescription refills, and referrals in a one stop shop approach. What was originally a simple appointment reminder can blossom into an automated conversation, fulfilling any outstanding care needed for the patient.

Should the patient need to talk to a care representative, the agent will have the same information at their fingertips ready to assist the patient beyond the original reason for the call. This ultimately ensures that the patient receives the healthcare experience they deserve from the agent or the system.

Improve Time Management Through Proactive Outreach and Deflection

Built to enhance customer communication, EHRConnect allows you to control messaging - helping level off the peaks and valleys that may occur in the contact center. This can be done by streamlining and automating reminders into one single notification, as well as staggering outbound messages based on agent availability. 

Proactive outreach and deflection through notifications allows agents to better manage their time. Centralize your patient communications and take control of where, when, and how you communicate with your patients.

Automate Patient Scheduling and Billing Needs

Attrition or the inability to fill seats in contact centers is more difficult than ever. With the help of EHRConnect, your contact center can automate patient scheduling and billing needs, not only saving your agents time and helping alleviate staffing issues but reducing patient cost and wait times.

The adoption of EHRConnect has resulted in a significant decrease in call transfer times up to 95% for healthcare providers. This is achieved by efficiently routing patients to the appropriate agent and equipping the agent with relevant information to effectively manage transferred calls.

EHRConnect provides agents everything at their fingertips to handle and resolve a higher volume of calls more efficiently, which translates to a lower cost per call, all while providing them an elevated work experience with personalized, instinctive tools. Happy agents result in happy patients.

With EHRConnect’s advanced automation and self-service capabilities, patients can resolve more issues, inquiries, and actions without agent involvement which frees up the agents to handle more calls that require live attention.

Conclusion:

Fragmented patient scheduling can pose significant challenges for both patients and doctors’ offices. Improving communication and coordination of care between doctors' offices can help to reduce the burden on patients and improve the quality of care. Solutions such as a single point of contact for scheduling and integrating Contact Centers with EHR systems can help to streamline patient communication and appointment scheduling, improving the overall patient experience.

Happier and healthier communities are only possible when we approach patient care with a multi-layer understanding. EHRConnect was designed to increase access and provide patients with the care they need and deserve.