Improving Patient Care And Customer Service For the Healthcare Industry

摘要

Who: Valley Radiologists, a large, full-service medical imaging center in Arizona. It has 10 locations and 45 radiologists, performs about 250,000 studies annually and plans to add locations and grow each year. Before: The multiple locations were supported by a single call center. In 2004, its network infrastructure and telephone system were a mismatched amalgamation of several vendor products without consistent support, backup or easy internal communications. The radiologists did not have access to the most-up-to-date imaging technology, which compromised their ability to consult efficiently with referring physicians and left open the possibility that a referring physician could send cases to other radiology practices, resulting in lost revenue. As a result, prospective patients calling into the call center were sometimes dropped, and hold times could extend to beyond 10 minutes. More importantly, patient care was sometimes offered at below optimal levels because radiologists did not have the means to easily access images, and often had to travel to multiple locations to review cases.