Averting Downtime with a Hosted Contact Center Solution
By Nicole Limpert
Piedmont Healthcare was founded as Piedmont Hospital by Drs. Ludwig Amster and Floyd Willcox McRae in 1905. Today, the nonprofit system is the largest Georgia-based employer in the state and employs more than 44,000 people who provide care for 3.7 million patients.
The organization has an astounding number of physical locations, including 23 hospitals, 72 Piedmont Urgent Care centers, 25 QuickCare locations, 1,875 Piedmont Clinic physician practices, and 3,200 Piedmont Clinic members. Between 2018-2023, Piedmont provided $1.4 billion in uncompensated care and community benefit programming to the communities it serves.
Piedmont Healthcare was recognized twice by Newsweek in 2023 as one of America’s Greatest Workplaces for Diversity and one of America’s Greatest Workplaces for Women. Forbes ranked Piedmont Healthcare on its list of the Best Large Employers in the United States in 2022.
Upgrading from an On-Premise Solution to a Hosted Environment
The decision to upgrade to a cloud-based call center was made when Piedmont Healthcare experienced a significant service outage after their call center system in Athens, Georgia, went down. “We couldn’t answer calls, and our IT people were prohibited from working on our servers because they weren’t the property of our healthcare system,” said Jeremy Williams, Manager of the Call Operations Center for Piedmont Healthcare.
“A regular answering service will have its own IT department and programmers. So, the employees can troubleshoot and resolve issues when they arise,” continued Jeremy. “However, it’s different in a healthcare environment. Our IT staff have the knowledge and desire to help, but our organization’s policies and procedures will not allow them to touch a third-party piece of equipment because of liability concerns.”
When the problem was resolved, it was clear that the healthcare system needed another solution. There were too many limitations with Piedmont Healthcare’s on-premise equipment. Jeremy reached out to their contact center vendor and learned that a hosted environment removed the maintenance responsibilities from their organization. “Our vendor monitors the system, and they can identify and resolve issues before we even notice them,” stated Jeremy. “Now I’m only responsible for a VPN (virtual private network) tunnel that connects our system to Amazon’s Cloud and the computers that use it. IT was very much in agreement with our decision because no one here has to touch it, and it doesn’t have to live in our system or data center.”
Another immediate benefit Jeremy experienced was the ease of use of the new system, which reduced operator training time. He said, “I’ve noticed the training time for my brand-new agents has reduced significantly. I usually have them answering general calls within 2-3 days versus the 1-2 weeks it used to take.”
Jeremy is planning to use the new cloud-based technology for future redundancy needs. He said, “Using the cloud is just so much easier. We won’t have to have multiple servers in multiple areas. We can just have one VPN at a data center, and another at a different data center and link them together.”
Overcoming Initial Concerns from the IT Department
According to Statista, downtime caused by ransomware attacks on healthcare systems in the United States cost an estimated $14.7 billion from January to October 2023. In 2022, it cost the healthcare sector around $16 billion.
With that in mind, it’s understandable Jeremy feels the biggest challenge he faced was getting buy-in and approvals from Piedmont Healthcare’s IT department. “Our IT department is extremely particular, and they have to be. They are concerned about what information is going over the internet, hackers, targeting, ransomware, etc.,” said Jeremy. “Fortunately, I had an experienced internal project manager. There were still hurdles: the TSQ’s (Technical Security Questionnaires), Information Security Reviews, and product reviews. There was a lot of going back and forth and documentation, but she was incredibly successful at navigating the waters for us.”
“Our call center software vendor worked well with us and got us everything we needed within our time frame,” continued Jeremy. “They were very responsive when our IT department needed something and would jump on calls and answer questions. It was a collaborative effort.”
Automation and Consolidation
Future plans include integrating QGenda schedules into their on-call schedule system, automating standard announcements, and using speech recognition to replace their phone tree. Jeremy is anticipating using automated call scoring abilities and harnessing the power of the data collected by his call center to turn that information into actionable insights. “We run metrics and look at KPIs to see how my operators are running,” said Jeremy. “Right now, we only have ten calls graded per year, but I’m expecting to have many more calls graded to get a better understanding of where we actually are.”
He continued, “I am currently researching what it would take to move all the Piedmont PBX functions to the same hosted environment to create a standardized singular platform versus our current situation which has PBX agents scattered over many different departments with varied responsibilities. The opportunities to better align our services is exciting.”
Nicole Limpert is a marketing content writer for Amtelco.