It goes without saying that the number one priority for any healthcare organisation and its staff, is patient care and delivering a successful patient experience. Close behind patient care as a priority is also to establish efficient processes throughout the organisation, which will optimise operations and enhance a healthcare organisation’s standing when providing premium levels of patient care.
The simple answer is anywhere, but the area of most importance is the first point of contact – the call centre. Like any call centre, patients expect to be provided with the highest level of customer service and add to that the fact that health and wellbeing could be on the line, the process of delivering exceptional customer service just became that much more important.
The first step in the experience of what could be a scared or emotional patient is a call to the call centre and how this call is handled is paramount to the success of a healthcare organisation
So where does a knowledge management system fit into patient care?
These calls could span a wide range of queries, from insurance coverage and claims to clinic times and patient enrolment, there is an abundance of information that needs to be correctly communicated to the patient and if the information is unavailable a correct pointer of where to go next is just as important.
Failure to get the right information at the right time can lead to patient dissatisfaction and seeking help from a rival institution.
How can knowledge management in healthcare help to alleviate these issues?
A comprehensive knowledge management system enables any organisation to harvest their knowledge for healthcare from any location and presents it to those who need it as quickly as possible. A key problem within a healthcare organisation’s call centre, is that this knowledge is frequently changing on a daily basis, therefore necessitating the need for quick and effortless content creation and maintenance from a wide range of authors.
Content changes and creation not only need to be made but they must also be conveyed to the agent with a clear notification of these changes. Notifying agents of recent updates throughout the day within a single system, is a powerful tool to streamline the activities of the agent and allows them to quickly and accurately transmit the correct information to a patient during a potentially complex call scenario.
In addition to notifying call centre staff of recent updates, agents must have the ability to readily find the information they are looking for from a vast amount of broad and varied information. Providing agents with the ability to search a knowledgebase system with Natural Language Search and using the customer’s own terminology, not only presents them with an accurate result first time, but also captures both the topic and context of patient queries, which is invaluable when looking at areas to strengthen your healthcare organisation’s knowledge.
Who else can benefit from knowledge management in healthcare?
With functionally sound knowledge base software and the right culture in place to adopt a knowledge management system, the importance of knowledge for healthcare and its benefits can be appreciated across the whole healthcare institution.
Provided that they have the privileges to do so, anybody within the organisation from consultant physicians to call centre agents, has the ability to contribute their tacit and experiential knowledge into a knowledge management system. This enables you to hone in on one of the most valuable assets of any organisation and place it at the forefront of activities when providing excellent patient care and making key business decisions.
Having this knowledge at every point of call ensures that patient satisfaction is enhanced, but also that patient retention and acquisition is maximised. This comes as a close second place to patient care when evaluating the role of knowledge management in business operations and maximising healthcare growth and innovation.
Knowledge for healthcare; to discover a ‘Strategy to Enhance Patient Care’ in your Healthcare organisation, click the links below to contact us or to request a demonstration: