(This article was originally published in
Healthcare Call Center Times in February 2021.)
NORTH RICHLAND HILLS, TX—When we last looked at Stericycle Communication Solutions in our October 2016 issue (“What’s Up and What’s Not According to Stericycle”), their healthcare work took place mainly from a converted Walmart, courtesy of BerylHealth, a freestanding healthcare call center company that Stericycle acquired in 2012.
In 2018, the company moved the call center about 10 minutes away to a commercial neighborhood. The 400 employees in the call center share space and phone technology with another part of Stericycle that handles product recalls. But, otherwise they are two completely separate business entities.
Moving locations is not the only thing that has shifted for this healthcare call center operation. “We are seeing a lot more focus on outbound and adherence to care plans,” says Matt Dickson, Vice President of Product Strategy and Communication Solutions. “It’s a major part of our business now.” This change has come at a time when the two parts of the post-discharge piece are growing at healthcare organizations: the increasing focus on the patient experience and the attention to readmissions reduction.
A number of the company’s clients are having them do outbound patient satisfaction calls. These are done by the call center’s non-clinical agents. Also, a number of their clients are wanting post-discharge calls that are more clinical in nature, asking many of the standard questions such as how the patient is feeling, if they have gotten their prescriptions and begun taking their medications, etc. Some of their clients are okay with non-clinical staff members making this call; others want to have nurses do it, which the company accommodates.
One of the trends Dickson is picking up is a willingness of healthcare organizations to move beyond the two, three or four post-discharge calls to a more expansive view of care coordination. This can mean extending the calls or perhaps automating some check-in calls over the succeeding months.
It can also mean working on very specific outbound calling campaigns designed to maintain and/or improve health. One of the marker events for the company and a number of its clients is the annual flu shot promotion each fall. However, there is no way that every single person can be contacted by live call center agents with encouragement to get a flu shot.
“We look at this more holistically so everyone can get the message but also target at risk populations,” he says. “We have an automated outreach capability that can call everyone, but also we use our live agents to call those at high risk.” The company has created a methodology for classifying people into risk groups, but also uses the client’s own system if that is preferred.
Employees are hired first into the call center and then assigned to work on either the inbound or outbound side. In both cases, they are, for the most part, assigned to teams handling a specific set of clients. It is done that way so the representatives get to know their client’s culture and processes.
The legacy services of this call center, going back several decades, focused on physician referral and class registration. Dickson says that the physician referral part of the business is stable, even in an age of proliferation of online physician directories. “There are still a lot of people who prefer to pick up the phone,” he says. Class registration is similar, but has also expanded beyond taking inbound calls to outbound. Specifically, within the care continuum model, he is seeing healthcare organizations proactively offer classes to certain patients as part of their recovery to health journey. Dickson qualifies his comments by saying that is important to offer these services both by phone and online so the patient can choose their preferred communications vehicle.
Along that line, the company offers online scheduling through InQuicker. Dickson has found that it is mostly primary care practices that are most amenable to online scheduling. One of the reasons that specialists are less than enthusiastic about having online appointments is that they are not convinced that all patients coming this way will be appropriate for them, he says. This can be because the patient should have seen a primary care doctor for their problem, or, perhaps they belong at the specialist but never received a referral, meaning that there is no reimbursement from the patient’s insurer.