Kaiser Permanente subsidiary KP OnCall is a clinical contact center for telehealth programs, serving more than four million people in California, Hawaii and Georgia.
Since 1994, KP OnCall has operated a Nurse Telephone Triage and Advise line. Nurses staffing the line would ask callers a series of questions, leading to long phone conversations. KP OnCall wanted to streamline the process and cut costs through automated interviews.
For one thing, callers often had to wait up to two hours to reach a nurse. Moreover, it costs more than $150,000 per year for a single live nurse phone agent, therefore KP OnCall wanted to make sure only the most urgent calls were escalated to a live phone call or chat session.
It decided to start out by focusing on the diagnosis of urinary tract infections. Using Oracle Service Cloud, KP OnCall developed an web questionnaire that mimicked the type of back-and-forth nurses had with callers when trying to diagnose UTIs. Patients have the ability to click and call or chat live with a nurse at any time. If they are diagnosed with a UTI, a prescription can automatically be sent to their pharmacy.
The UTI use case proved to be an appropriate one. Before rolling out Oracle Service Cloud, KP OnCall nurses were speaking to nearly 40,000 women with UTIs, at a labor cost of $640,000. This year it expects to cut the time nurses spend talking to UTI sufferers by 50 percent. And users are warming to service automation: A survey of those who used the online questionnaire found that 90 percent preferred it over other options.
KP OnCall is now planning a much broader service automation rollout, having determined additional disease states that are appropriate for this approach.
Go here for more details of KP OnCall’s award-winning project.