CUSTOMER PROFILE
ABOUT THE CLIENT
This U.S.-based not-for-profit integrated health care system is comprised of multiple hospitals, a large provider network, a variety of clinical programs through its academic centers, and affiliate hospitals and hospital systems across its home state. The health care system has over 800 call center representatives across 26 departments, handles over 12,000 calls per day, and plans to add six additional departments in the immediate future.
LOCATION
Southeastern United States
BUSINESS NEED
- Rewrite compliance policies
- Proactively respond to audits
- Effectively use their NICE solutions
NICE SOLUTIONS
- NICE Compliance Center
- NICE Desktop Tagging & Triggering
- NICE Recording
- NICE Value Realization Services
THE IMPACT
- 100% improvement in compliance and metric visibility
- 50-75% reduction in time to research call recordings
- 99.84% call recording
THE GOAL
As a healthcare provider, the customer is challenged with a complex call recording environment that must support both legal and financial compliance. Call recording is essential, but the health care system was experiencing issues with its existing call recording platform. After researching their options, getting product demonstrations and examining their potential partners’ experience in healthcare, the customer decided to transition from its existing call recording platform to NICE’s recording solution and also take advantage of key features such as Desktop Tagging and Triggering as well as NICE’s Compliance Center solution.
From a legal perspective, the health care system must ensure compliance with HIPAA and patient privacy regulations. They also have patient care hotlines, where nursing staff provide medical and patient care advice, so they must be able to find and provide those calls if they’re ever requested in a court of law or in response to a lawsuit.
From a financial perspective, the customer has a patient billing department and, as such, must be able to pause and resume recording, when appropriate, to maintain PCI DSS compliance.
As part of this call recording and compliance enhancement process, the customer aimed to:
- Update their compliance policies.
- Enable proactive querying in response to audits and legal questions.
Reduce audit support tickets from supervisors to their IT organization.NICE Value Realization Services (VRS) was key in helping the organization reach these goals and achieve not only widespread adoption but smart and consistent utilization of the features available to them.
THE SOLUTION
For this health care system customer, NICE Compliance Center and NICE call recording solutions are necessary and good, but, according to the customer, “the better solution, for us, was the Business Consultant resources we had through NICE VRS. They were excellent advocates for us, and very flexible as they worked with us to achieve our goals.”
The organization benefited from their business consultants’ extensive experience with not only call recording and compliance but also their exposure and access to other NICE clients (for confidential surveying) and industry benchmarking data.
THE RESULTS
New Policies, New Procedures
The health care system’s issues with outdated compliance policies and procedures had to be addressed alongside the implementation This left the organization’s technical telecommunications experts rewriting legal compliance policies and procedures.
“Our VRS consultants researched call recording policies and helped us understand both what we had to do at a minimum as well as what others in the healthcare industry do as a best practice,” the customer explains. The health care system was able to write its new call recording and compliance policies following NICE VRS’ recommendations.
VRS provided the knowledge needed to make important policy decisions, but also charted a course of action. The customer shares, “Stepby- step, our VRS consultants identified our vulnerabilities, told us what we needed to do, what information we needed to lock down, and how we needed to manage the information we were storing. They told us what additional procedures we needed to implement to make our systems effective.”
Everyone Wants Call Recording
Beyond simply having new software, NICE VRS took additional steps to highlight the features and benefits of the new call recording system that would be most useful to the organization’s end-users and how they operate. This included education around Desktop Tagging and Triggering.
With NICE call recording, the health care system only needed two triggers for pause and resume— making agents’ lives much easier, and then with tagging, they only needed to add the patient’s reference number and make their notes.
The organization’s telecom engineer says, “The call recording system is so much better and easier to use than what we had before. Our managers started talking to other managers at other clinics, so now I have a backlog of requests from teams wanting access even though we’ve never promoted the new call recording system.”
“Our supervisors find NICE recording easy to use, so IT is called in far less often—that’s one benefit. Another is that what used to take about four hours is down to about one to two hours. Everyone is much happier.”
Sr. Telecommunications Engineer
Enabling Supervisors with Information
Before updating the call recording system, it was difficult for supervisors to find the information needed. As a result, they would contact IT, and the health care system’s telecom engineers would spend hours researching a single recording.
The telecom engineers would have to note the date and time of calls associated with agent notes in the CRM and cross-reference that with the phone number the call originated from in their master patient index system. Then, they’d have to tie that phone number to the phone number captured in the call recording system—which still wasn’t always effective because patients could call in from other numbers.
To make matters worse, because supervisors were not regularly using the system, when they needed to do their annual quality audits, the IT team was getting hit with many extraneous support tickets for password resets. NICE VRS trained the organization’s supervisors directly, focusing on the recording system’s search capability.
“Our supervisors find NICE recording easy to use, so IT is called in far less often—that’s one benefit,” says the health care system’s telecom engineer. “Another is that what used to take about four hours is down to about one to two hours. Everyone is much happier.”
From Investigation to Proactive Compliance
Before, supervisors were calling the telecom engineers (often belatedly) to say, “Hey, I didn’t get that recording” and the team wouldn’t know why or what other calls might be missing. The lack of information made it challenging to adequately support legal events—to the point that their legal department believed they were deliberately deleting calls.
This changed with NICE Compliance Center. The organization now has call compliance assurance dashboards. They can also proactively run daily, weekly and monthly call recording reports. With these analytics, the telecom team can back up audits and legal compliance events. They can easily identify whether they’ve lost a call or a set of calls, for example, and can point to exactly when it happened.
The health care system’s telecom engineer says, “The compliance assurance dashboards have enriched our ability to support legal events. NICE VRS not only helped us set up those dashboards, they also provided the training we needed to proactively respond to audits and questions from legal.”
“We have metrics now, that we’ve never had before. If we have a 99.8% call recording success rate, we’re now able to focus on why that .2% failed. Having data and analytics you can point to in response to legal events makes a difference.”
