Maximizing Call-Recording Reliability and Easing Call-Data Access in Healthcare Contact Centers

Elevēo tools support call-recording, compliance and customer satisfaction efforts across a major healthcare provider’s 18 business units.

Overview

Need

A healthcare provider operating in a stringent regulatory environment needs to ensure that all incoming calls to its contact centers are recorded, securely stored and easily searchable.

Solution

This major healthcare provider’s corporate contact center operation utilizes Elevēo Call-Recording and Screen-Recording tools across 18 business units on the Cisco UCCE contact center platform.

Benefit

With this healthcare provider’s call and screen-recording capabilities at 100 per cent, and its call data search capabilities streamlined, the organization has strengthened compliance and improved customer satisfaction scores.

No industry is less tolerant of error and omission than healthcare, particularly for those organizations providing direct patient care. This healthcare provider, with nearly 200 hospitals and 2,000 specialized care sites, operates in a world intolerant of compromise,
a world of fundamentals - life, death, well-being and patient privacy.

With stakes that high, it’s easy to forget that providing healthcare services is also
a business, not immune to competition. Its patients are its customers with consumer expectations for quality of service, communication and transparency. 

A large, interconnected ecosystem of service organizations - business units - support this healthcare provider’s clinical and business missions. Some serve as direct patient touchpoints for appointment scheduling, appointment follow-ups, aftercare questions or transfers between facilities. Others remain behind the scenes, a central help-desk handling IT issues for internal users, for example. Each business unit has a contact center at its foundation.

 “If our recording solution goes down and there’s a gap in our call records, we’re in major legal jeopardy, so when I say I honestly can’t remember the last time I received an outage report on Elevēo, that’s significant. We don’t lose calls; it’s that simple.”

The healthcare provider has standardized on Cisco UCCE as the telephony platform in those business units whose reach extends across the enterprise. Ultimate responsibility for supporting the contact center software operating on the Cisco platform falls to the organization’s corporate contact center team. 

“One of our functions is to provide recommendations about which call and screen-recording system our business units should be using. We then act as their contact and escalation point for any issues with the system, provided they follow our recommendation,” says the contact center team’s leader. He offers a pragmatic reason for not supporting a nonrecommended call recording solution. “Support would be totally unmanageable if each business line had a different platform and recording tool; we need
to be standardized.”

The corporate recommendation for call and screen recording is Elevēo.

Confidence in Elevēo

The contact center leader characterizes Elevēo Call Recording as ‘hardened’ within the business, with 18 business units and close to 5,000 users presently utilizing the tool. Each of the contact centers within the organization operates autonomously, and all are relatively small. The largest contact center has around five hundred agents.

He cites three reasons for his confidence in Elevēo: uptime, assurance that no calls will be lost, and ease of access to call records and data. Those requirements aren’t necessarily specific to healthcare, but in healthcare, the cost of failure is much higher.

"If our recording solution goes down and there’s a gap in our call records, we’re in major legal jeopardy, so when I say I honestly can’t remember the last time I received an outage report on Elevēo, that’s significant. We don’t lose calls; it’s that simple,” he says. “And with Elevēo’s call tagging capabilities and its integration with Cisco Finesse, we can filter every call by case number or medical record number (MRN), agent, day and time, giving us the ability to find and review any call quickly.”

In the past, if the organization’s legal or billing department needed to hear a particular recording, the contact center team would launch a full-scale investigation to find out which agent took the call during an approximate timeframe. Then they’d listen to hours of calls before finding the right one. With Elevēo’s Finesse integration, they can retrieve the
call almost immediately. Moreover, Elevēo’s Media Lifecycle Management tool retains and protects recordings for up to seven years.

That not only provides legal protection, it also safeguards against potential financial loss. One example is denial-of-coverage cases, when an insurance company approves a patient admission and later repeals it, refusing to pay the bill. The healthcare provider’s caseworkers can quickly find relevant calls using the Medical Record Number and provide evidence that the admission was authorized. The contact center leader summarizes his organization’s call recording policy succinctly, “Any gaps in recordings are unacceptable here.”

“With Elevēo’s call tagging capabilities and its integration with Cisco Finesse, we can filter every call by case number or medical record number (MRN), agent, day and time, giving us the ability to find and review any call quickly.”

Beyond call recording, Elevēo’s Quality Management module is gaining traction within the enterprise. Its National Contact Center Management business unit, for example, dedicates staff exclusively to call quality and agent quality reviews and they utilize Elevēo QM extensively. “They handle a lot of our appointment follow-ups and longer-term patient aftercare interactions, and they’re one of our most mature groups on Elevēo,” the leader says. “They and our internal IT Help-Desk business unit utilize QM for agent score-carding. It’s certainly making our agents better. It informs our coaching and training, which means our agents are getting better and they’re handling more calls effectively, which improves our customer satisfaction scores.”

Support, Agility and High Availability

As if meeting the standards of the healthcare provider’s zero-tolerance call recording environment isn’t challenging enough, the complexity and scale of the organization’s infrastructure presents an entirely distinct set of technical issues.

“Our network probably rivals the top ten companies in the United States, and our security probably rivals the top five. Elevēo engineers spent a tremendous amount of time working with us, analyzing every facet of our architecture, network security and firewalls. We jointly architected a solution within our organization that would help us significantly shorten our data transfer times and access recordings,” the contact center leader says. “So, working together, we came up with a much better architecture that delivers the kind of performance we have today.”

He adds that automated platforms and Elevēo’s engineering support team, which handles
enhancements, upgrades and most day-to-day issues without requiring internal IT resources, make Elevēo a low-maintenance tool and a vital component of the organization’s standardized call center platform.

That status means Elevēo plays an important role in helping the contact center team deliver operational continuity to contact centers during natural and manmade disasters. Multiple times over the past 10 years, the team has set up call centers for its Emergency
Operation Transfer Centers in areas impacted by a hurricane. Those transfer centers are charged with moving patients from facilities in the affected area to others in a safe location.

“We’re able to establish 800 numbers dedicated to these transfer centers almost immediately and assign agents from other transfer centers throughout the country to their call queues,” the leader explains. “Elevēo is still capturing every call, and that’s because
every transfer center is operating on a UCCE/Elevēo standard.”

Responding to temporary and unpredictable Covid-related call spikes at some of its call centers requires even more agility, with the contact center team adding 30 or 40 agents to a contact center’s staff - in a matter of minutes. From anywhere in the US, those agents immediately tie into the existing queues and help support the overwhelmed transfer center, Elevēo recording every screen and call.

“Until five or six years ago, some transfer centers were on local systems - not the enterprise standard. They were all managed independently at the division level, so there’s no way they could help each other,” the leader says. “We migrated over a dozen divisions
within the transfer center business unit to Elevēo, and we’ve not heard one group say they took a step backward in call recording. In fact, we hear positive comments about uptime and reliability, which was always a struggle. As I said, we don’t do recording gaps here, and, with Elevēo, we don’t have them.”