Chapter 3

Elevate workforce experiences

Scale teams with automation and personalization built into existing operations

Across the healthcare space, teams are faced with time-intensive and error-prone manual data entry and forms that must be filled out repeatedly at multiple touchpoints. Cross-departmental record management is often disconnected, leading to time-consuming efforts to reconcile data. Various siloed member engagement solutions are used across many organizations.

The healthcare and life sciences industry has seen a significant uptick in merger-and-acquisition activity over the last decade. One result of this is that organizations now need to scale their teams not only due to organic growth, but also to bring together teams and technology from the merged entities. At the same time, long-standing healthcare organizations are feeling pressure to increase their reach and keep up with new services offered by digital-first upstarts in the field. In response to the pandemic, many of the non-frontline roles within healthcare have transitioned to remote work. This leaves room for technological enhancements for every type of nonclinical workflow from scheduling to record-keeping and client communications.

Remotely centralizing the workforce on the cloud presents opportunities for organizations not only to allow their current employees to work more flexibly but to leverage labor and material resources in lower-cost markets. It’s possible for a health system in San Francisco to find the best talent for each role, regardless of location, without needing to pay the overhead of maintaining a contact center in the expensive local real estate market. Furthermore, a virtual contact center can scale up or down as needed without the costs and delays of adding physical infrastructure. Virtual contact centers built on Twilio’s platform allow the power and security of cloud centralization.

A patient reviews their data with a trusted healthcare professional.

Call routing and optimization

When COVID-19 vaccines first came out, there was a rush of people eager to establish a place in line. With mixed eligibility and different types of inquiries, handling the incoming calls was a complex problem. Many companies and hospitals were able to quickly stand up hotlines that routed the calls based on caller information: Were they eligible for the vaccine based on factors like age, occupation, or underlying medical condition? The IVR systems were able to collect information upfront, and based on the user input, route the call for the appropriate next step. Callers who were ineligible at that time could be routed to an automated workflow that would collect contact information and automatically notify them when they became eligible. Callers who did qualify and were at particularly high risk could be automatically scheduled through the system or routed to an agent who could schedule a vaccine appointment for them. This combination of automation and handoff to a person acts as a force multiplier for the people working on the frontlines.

App-based healthcare service Concilio faced its own contact center issues, which were exacerbated when the pandemic forced its workforce to go remote. VPN issues degraded the customer experience even as the number of users and agents continued to grow. After trying several systems that each specialized in just one area, Concilio knew it needed to find a single platform that could synthesize all their existing contact center tools while streamlining agent functions such as calling, scheduling, and texting. Using flexible, scalable, cloud-based contact center platform Twilio Flex, Concilio was able to do just that in a matter of weeks; and after just 10 days of the new system’s implementation, agent complaints had dropped to zero.

Case study

Reinventing the patient billing experience

Inbox Health takes the cumbersome paper-based payment process and transforms it into a workflow that’s clearer and more user-friendly. Using available data to contextualize every patient’s communication helps Inbox Health personalize not only the conversation, but also the outreach channel. The company uses IVR and Twilio <Pay> to help personalize patient billing and make it easy to pay over the phone within a PCI-compliant system. When an interaction does reach an agent after initial automated contact, those agents have a holistic overview of the patient’s interaction history at a glance. The entire interaction can channel-switch seamlessly, with patients replying to calls via text message or vice versa.

Inbox Health’s engineers appreciated the clean documentation that enabled them to easily integrate Twilio <Pay> into their existing Twilio IVR and Stripe payment system. The IVR reduced incoming calls by 800 calls per month, as well as reducing average call times from five minutes down to two and a half minutes. The company was also able to maintain the same success rate with fewer agents.

A healthcare professional reviews patient data.

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