Case Study: Valley Medical Center Improves Patient Experience

The large non-profit healthcare provider, Valley Medical Center, chose Aspect Software to improve patient experience, and here’s why.

The Organisation

Located in Renton, Washington, Valley Medical Center (VMC) serves over 600,000 residents offering medical, surgical and 24-hour emergency care as a Level III Trauma Centre.

In addition to the hospital, VMC operates a network of more than two dozen primary care, urgent care and specialty clinics throughout Southeast King County.

Motivation for Change

Every initiative at Valley Medical Center is designed to put patients first, which requires constant assessment of the effectiveness of the centre’s procedures.

Accomplishing this mission is what prompted Valley Medical Center to seek out new technologies that would help elevate the patient experience. They recognised that their outdated technology perpetuated fragmented processes across siloed departments. This resulted in slowing the pace of patient interactions and impacting the overall patient experience.

In addition, a lack of technology integration created reporting challenges across the organisation and limited visibility into their outbound dialling campaigns.

Other capabilities that Valley Medical Center lacked included complex outbound dialling, screen and call recordings (to help drive quality and patient communication) and unified reporting.

Another catalyst for undertaking a technology upgrade was The Healthcare Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, which provided $30 billion to stimulate the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records and related infrastructure.

Desired Solution

Valley Medical Center based their criteria for new patient communication technology on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Triple Aim: decrease healthcare costs, improve population health and enhance care for the individual.

Of utmost importance to Valley Medical Center was the ability of their communication technology to integrate with their healthcare record software, Epic, through desktop integration and automation for patients calling to make, cancel and confirm appointments.

Specific to patient communications, Valley Medical Center wanted to better connect with today’s patients by expanding beyond voice technology. They also wanted to retire legacy systems and consolidate under one vendor.

Why Aspect

The heart of the enterprise-wide health record system at Valley Medical Center is Epic. Valley Medical Center selected Aspect as the communication tool that could most help enhance the patient care experience due to Aspect’s integration with Epic. This technology integration puts Valley Medical Center at the leading edge of utilising patient record management to personalise and improve the overall patient experience.

To make their goals a reality, VMC deployed:

• Aspect Patient ConnectTM
• Advanced List ManagementTM
• Aspect EQTM Quality ManagementTM
• Aspect SecureAgentTM
• Aspect EQTM Workforce ManagementTM
• Aspect EQTM Performance ManagementTM
• Aspect Customer Experience PlatformTM (CXP) Pro
• Customer Survey
• Customer Email
• SMS

The Results

Since deploying the full suite of Patient Engagement Solutions, Valley Medical Center has seen many positive patient impacts. The goal for the Aspect integration with Epic was to optimise call handling, reduce table time loss and update Epic dynamically.

Today, screen pops connect Aspect’s interaction management technology with Epic’ s Hyperspace client upon the arrival of an incoming interaction, whether it be a call, email, text or other channel.

Pulling up a patient record prior to a conversation saves the patient time and gives agents a substantial headstart on Epic-based workflows.