By Nicole Limpert and the Seattle Children’s Team
Seattle Children’s is the pediatric and adolescent academic medical center for Washington, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho, serving the largest region of any children’s hospital in the country. Since its founding in 1907, the organization has grown from a seven-bed facility to a 423-licensed-bed hospital with more than 10,000 active employees, nearly 2,000 active medical staff, and about half a million annual patient visits. Its mission to provide hope, care, and cures regardless of a family’s ability to pay remains unwavering. U.S. News World Report, which ranks the top 50 pediatric hospitals in 11 specialty areas, has recognized Seattle Children’s as a top children’s hospital each year since it began ranking medical facilities more than 30 years ago.
Improving the Hub of Hospital Communications
Seattle Children’s call center serves as the organization’s virtual reception and information office, and is critical for coordinating patient care and managing emergencies. Its operators process nearly one million calls with patients, families, and staff each year, including over 250,000 paging requests and 21,000 outside physician consult requests. They also handle an average of 110 medical, security, fire, or other emergency codes per week, and assist departments with maintaining on-call schedules.
Until recently, Seattle Children’s was using one system for call distribution and another for its operators. As the healthcare landscape evolved, Seattle Children’s recognized the opportunity to upgrade and streamline its call center technology to reduce downtime and ensure timely support and seamless care coordination
“We are often the first touchpoint for patients, families, and staff,” says Gerard Perez, Voice Operations Manager for Seattle Children’s. “It’s critical for our systems to run smoothly so every call can connect clearly and consistently without interruption.”
Seattle Children’s evaluated options to unify its call center tools into a single system that would improve service availability and staff productivity. It selected a vendor with a platform to support its call center needs, and the Seattle Children’s Voice Operations team collaborated with them to complete the call center upgrade to better support around-the-clock operators providing critical communication services for patients, families, and staff.
Achieving Impactful Results
With the vendor’s robust suite of services and customizations, the Seattle Children’s call center has even greater control over queues to drive more effective call management. The Voice Operations team leveraged features such as Automatic Call Distributor (ACD) and Automatic Number Identification (ANI) to:
- Build more intuitive phone trees – driving incoming calls to the right place and reducing or eliminating the need for transfers and delays
- Generate special announcements and call greetings – scheduling elevator alarms, holiday greetings for patient callers and staff, and travel advisories
- Route and redirect calls automatically – blocking spam calls, routing special calls types to streamlined queues, and building call handling protocols for specific facilities and partners
Following an assessment of clinical call wait times, a pilot was conducted within the Seattle Children’s Urology Clinic to test the functionality of these improvements and assess for potential impacts. The clinic’s phone tree was replaced with customized greetings and options built with the vendor’s platform, and live operators were placed on standby to handle calls falling outside initial triage options. During this testing period, it was found that of the 70 calls per day handled by the Urology team on average, 33% of the calls did not need to be transferred to staff and could be effectively handled by the phone tree without negatively impacting patient care. As a result, the average answer time for the clinic was reduced from 33 seconds to 19 seconds, freeing up the Urology team to spend more time on what matters most: focusing on patient care.
Since implementing these upgrades with their vendor, Seattle Children’s call center has also:
- Achieved 100% agent uptime with 0 lost connection events, supporting greater service availability to meet patient and family needs
- Increased patient, family, and staff satisfaction scores with improved call experience
- Reduced downtime needed for system update testing, regular maintenance, and configuration tasks
- Eliminated 30-50 spam calls daily, freeing queues for patients and families to reach care teams even faster
- Improved speed of interpretive services triage for non-English patients and families, ensuring quicker and more direct access to interpreters and Seattle Children’s operators
Continuing Progress
Seattle Children’s continues to collaborate with their vendor to provide the best call experience possible for patients, families, and staff. Its Voice Operations leaders are also empowered with stronger processes and data to make critical operational decisions, such as:
- Measuring call activity and average talk time to calculate FTE per unit of calls
- Calculating expected calls if all phone trees are eliminated
- Establishing a budget for the needed FTE
“We found our operators could provide more services for patients and their families without transferring them to another department for information or assistance,” shared Gerard. “There hasn’t been anything we wanted to design that we couldn’t achieve with our vendor.”
Nicole Limpert is a marketing content writer for Amtelco.