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BOSTON, MA—Welcome Wagon® is a name steeped in North American history, having been in existence since 1928. The concept was to do outreach to newcomers both in person and via the mail and provide them with materials and advice that would be helpful to those settling into their communities.
The “Welcome” verbiage is an anomaly in the naming world of the healthcare call center. However, one healthcare organization has recently adopted this word as a most appropriate way to convey the mission of its new patient contact center. The Welcome Center was started by the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2018 after gathering feedback from patients and physicians about how to solve its access issues. The name was developed as a way to convey that the contact center was acting as the patient’s front door. New patients “are anxious. They may have just been diagnosed with cancer,” says Katie, Keavany, VP, Ambulatory Clinical Operations. “We want them to feel welcome.”
The Welcome Center has been a godsend for the organization’s prior access struggles, which were magnified by the sheer number of outpatient visits. The Institute annually has approximately 640,000 outpatient visits. Over a several year period, the Institute was experiencing “an increase in patient complaints,” she says. “It was hard for people to get to the right person at the right time. We had an inconsistent level of service in our 19 different treatment centers.” This was in part because patients calling the treatment centers were having their calls handled by individuals who also had other responsibilities, including serving the patients in front of them.
Additionally, when calls were not answered they bounced to a third party answering service, she says. The message then went back to the staff member at the practice site who then tried to call the patient back. In some cases, the patient would not answer and then the whole cycle would start again. The problem kept getting worse as the Institute’s volume was growing by 6 percent a year. Something needed to be done.
The Welcome Center is one piece of the contact center solution; the other pieces reside in the treatment centers. Here’s how the contact center platform is now organized. The Welcome Center has 30 non-clinical individuals who are the front line for all calls from new patients. No matter what phone number these prospective patients use to contact Dana-Farber, they all will come into the Welcome Center.
The staff members were new hires; they did not transfer over from the treatment sites. Doing it this way allowed the treatment sites to better serve their patient populations. They can handle a wide variety of informational questions. For patients wanting to schedule a new appointment, they are warm transferred to the new patient coordinators for appointment scheduling. These 50 individuals work in the various treatment centers.
Also working in the treatment centers are 80 clinical scheduling specialists who handle the established patient population. These are non-clinical individuals who must have a higher level of knowledge to handle the needs of this population. Clinical questions that need the intervention of a nurse are transferred internally to the right person. Overflow calls go to the Welcome Center representatives.
Epic is used for scheduling while Evariant (now part of Healthgrades) is used for CRM. This allows, among other things, patient information to be captured and stored so callers will be easily served without having to repeat information they’ve provided previously or having the staff member to go to great lengths to gather the information needed to successfully process the call.
