Turning the Healthcare Frown Upside-Down

Thomas John at Five9 explains how to turn the healthcare frown upside down.

Is anyone, aside from the Press, happy with all the doom and gloom? Brexit, secular pandemic tailwinds, climate change, political chaos and instability in Europe all make regular front-cover stories.

Meanwhile, the healthcare sector is apparently reeling under front-line staff shortages, support-staff layoffs, budget challenges and stories of people waiting unacceptable times for treatment and operations.

However, my glass is always half-full, and as an optimist I know that the problems we face are entirely surmountable with a little ingenuity and focus.

Healthcare is a subject that’s obviously close to my heart.

As you’d expect, I spend an enormous amount of time talking to my counterparts from the Five9 Partner Community about creating solutions and chatting with the Press, so here are my top 3 suggestions that could help the Healthcare sector really embrace ‘Digital Transformation’ and triumphantly emerge from ‘the crisis’ in support of today’s market:

1. Embrace Cloud technology

The exodus from on-prem systems to cloud based ones is not only real but relentless. We have living examples of how our technological (Five9 + Partner) support for critical Healthcare systems that we’ve supported with 99.999% reliability.

For anyone that doesn’t know already, that’s the origin of the Five9 brand which equates to around 5 minutes of downtime a year (or 5.15 minutes precisely for any real geeks out there.)

Moving to the cloud not only saves operational dollars, but actually increases your security levels too. Please consider closing down that server room and freeing up your Operating Expense budget for higher value investments as soon as possible.

2. Automate – Then Celebrate

Modern AI/ Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) systems use Natural Language Processing – which means they can interact with your callers, texters, WhatsAppers and Tweeters in 1000’s of languages and fulfil basic tasks: Appointment booking, repeat prescriptions, logging your asthma peak flow readings or blood-sugar levels can all potentially happen without human interaction.

In fact, IVAs have become so ‘clever’ that they can tap-out and get you in touch with a human being if needs be.

Technologies like Work-Flow Automation (WFA) can fulfil basic admin tasks and ensure that all your systems are sharing data.

WFA is basically a ‘Robotic Process Automation’ offering and Five9 technology can interface (via easily installed Connectors) to the vast majority of mainstream systems and anything else that can talk to a RESTFul API.

In plain English that means no more copy-pasting and manually moving information from system to system to the relief of your administrative staff. Work Force Optimisation (WFO) assists with staff rosters, metrics, and the overall ability to help your agents do their job if you have enough staff to warrant help.

Five9 refers to this combination of IVA/WFA/WFO technology as a Digital Workforce and once you have a few basic automatic tasks mastered you’ll never look back and start looking for other areas than can be fulfilled by machines.

3. Go Mental Around Gamification!

It would be rude not to talk about Mental Health Care in this overall Healthcare context. So just for one second humour me and imagine being that front of house worker in your practice or business!

You know – the one that takes the calls, books appointments, and deals with enquiries? Yes, I am talking about the ‘wizard-behind-the-curtain’ that your business relies on. It’s a really tough gig and ultimately their own mental health is at stake in today’s macro-environment.

Five9 Gamification has PROVEN examples of how it can really motivate and actively help keep these unseen heroes become happier at work. Of course, using a Digital Workforce and relieving your admin-staff of those incredibly boring manual tasks also helps put a smile on their dial

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Five9 – View the Original Article

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