Your contact center is half-empty. Your phone lines are on fire but you don't have the staffing power to keep up. Your remaining employees desperately click through different apps on their computers and hurriedly bark into their headsets. You post a job listing on Indeed but there's not enough interest, let alone enough candidates with the skills to effectively serve your patients without making a catastrophic blunder.
Long story short, you're stuck in the healthcare Staffing Trap: Unable to flourish and grow without hiring new staff, and unable to perform at efficient levels with your current staff. The consequences are brutal:
- Excessive wait times.
- Poor quality data.
- Unsustainable workloads.
You're not alone. Thousands of healthcare facilities and nursing services across the nation face this bleak situation. It's seemingly impossible, unless you're a wealthy organization that can afford to hire and train an army of staff, to give patients the highest quality services. Patients are extremely unhappy about it. According to a recent Ipsos survey, “43% of Americans are unsatisfied with their medical system.”
A driving force of this deep disillusionment are healthcare staffing problems. Positive patient experiences are a direct result of positive staff experiences. When your team is miserable and sluggish because their jobs are too difficult, your patients experience Jammed Journeys: They can't schedule appointments in a timely manner, and they sometimes give up altogether.
Keona Health helped our clients escape the Staffing Trap, because finding healthcare staffing solutions is imperative not only for scaling but also to ensure the good health of the American people. The stakes are high.
Our clients were in dreadful staffing straights. A quick fix wouldn't do; they needed to transform their entire operation. But they were committed, diligent, and eventually captured success. You can too.
EmergeOrtho
EmergeOrtho, an organization with 45 locations and 270 orthopedic specialists, solved the above problems and doubled their number of providers without hiring any additional support staff. They overcame immense challenges:
- Physicians needed an even distribution of appointments.
- Patients needed more efficient customer service experiences.
- Call center staff needed help dealing with service inflation.
EmergeOrtho lacked the staffing resources to address these needs. So instead they used AI to enhance the productivity of their current staff. The effect of their streamlined operations was incredible—read the full case study: EmergeOrtho Case Study.
Central Maine Health (CMH)
Like EmergeOrtho, CMH streamlined the processes of their current staff, which resulted in:
- 60% faster training for triage nurses.
- 100% improved call documentation.
- Dramatically more efficient and accurate scheduling.
CMH’s contact center takes 38,000 triage nursing calls per year. They were using an interactive Voice Response (IVR) system, which had no standardization of communication, automatic call distribution, or call recording/tracking.
“CMH initially purchased Health Desk specifically for Nurse Triage and no other functions like scheduling,” said Maryanne Ponti, Chief Nursing Officer for CMH. “It proved to be so effective, however, that CMH now uses Health Desk for all but a few types of scheduling.”
Read the full case study: Central Maine Healthcare Case Study.
Virginia Women's Center
Virginia Women's Center, an organization with 5 offices and 44 providers, was in a quandary: They lacked the staffing power to effectively handle their 140,000 calls per year, and the phone positions they did fill required extensive training that lasted weeks.
VWC solved these problems with self-scheduling software, which allowed them to:
- Increase self-scheduled appointments to 25%—in just 6 months—with no money spent on marketing. This drastically reduced their call volume.
- Reduce onboarding time for their staff by 70%.
Wesley Ralston, Director of Clinical Informatics at VWC, said that “these [Keona Health] principles have allowed our practice to completely streamline incoming clinical triage and patient scheduling.”
Read the full case study: Virginia Women’s Center Case Study.
Why these healthcare facilities solved staffing where others failed
These organizations succeeded because they refused to cut corners, ignore feedback, or settle for mediocrity. They followed the principles of the Patient Access Model, an innovative three-pronged approach to staffing and scheduling:
- Simple Standards: a single set of standardized guidelines that every employee relies on to perform their tasks with confidence, precision, and speed.
- Modular Coordination: a single system of record that consolidates all essential patient, provider, and practice data into one platform that can be easily accessed by staff in the moments that matter.
- AutomatedFlow: an AI-guided call support system that guides staff to the optimal action during each and every patient interaction.
These weapons attack staffing problems at their source: tribal knowledge, documentation complexity, and Clinical Combinatorics. If you are determined to transform, your organization will also enjoy the bliss of silky smooth operations, superior care, and happy staff.
To take a deep dive into game-changing patient access and staffing techniques ==>
