healthsystemCIO.com is the sole online-only publication dedicated to exclusively and comprehensively serving the information needs of healthcare CIOs.
The entire focus of today’s post is based on a conversation I had with a frontline employee of a prominent health system in the southeast. This quote is taken directly from our conversation: “Because our call center is so bad, people do not call to cancel appointments; they come to the office to cancel their appointments. […]
Two weeks ago Washington announced an agreement in principle with our new best friends Iran to slow Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons. I thought we wanted to stop Iran’s ability to have a nuclear weapon, but I was not invited to the meetings. This week’s television coverage shows a US aircraft carrier shadowing an Iranian ship […]
What if you could click on a single link and learn about all of the innovations to a health system’s contact center or call center? Sometimes wishes really do come true. In the past 50 years, there have been three significant contact center innovations: from the rotary to a touchtone phone, from touchtone to cordless, and […]
The man next to me on the boarding platform at Penn Station was short in stature. He wore black leathers, and black combat boots. His wallet was affixed to his belt with a chain thick enough to have been scavenged from the Titanic. The man’s long, blond curly hair was shiny enough to land him […]
What do you know about the number 48? It is the smallest number with 10 divisors, and the product of all of those ten divisors equals 484. It is also the smallest even number that can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers in five different ways. It is a Harshad number; that means […]
As a parent, I’ve learned there are two types of tasks–those my children won’t do the first time I ask them, and those they won’t do no matter how many times I ask them. Here’s the segue. Hospitals have a gazillion business systems. Every business system can include the following three things: people—doing things; processes — […]
His colleague asked the physician, “How is it that you are able to see 10 times as many patients each day as the rest of us?” “You guys spend too much time meeting with patients and asking them questions. I do Facebook Care. I just look at their picture on Facebook, and if I don’t […]
What would you do differently if you knew that 60 percent of the people who call your health system were already disappointed? Would everyone have better experience if the health system closed its call center? Quite possibly. Why run the risk of disappointing the other 40 percent of your callers for the first time, and […]
It is time we pull back the curtain and tell the truth about patient access and scheduling. The points of truth are: Almost all access happens by phone. Most health systems do not have a “call center.” What they have is a room with a lot of phones and a lot of people whose job […]
One of the problems with getting across a new idea is presenting it in a manner that allows others to visualize something they have not seen before. I think people have that problem when it comes to understanding how to recast patient experience and patient access. We have patients, they think to themselves, therefore those […]
