The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Resource Management

eBook
THE HEALTHCARE
PROVIDER’S GUIDE TO
RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT

www.genesys.com Join the Conversation
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As healthcare providers, you face the daunting task
of providing high-quality care to patients, a well-run
establishment for personnel, and an efficient and
effective business for management or shareholders.
This is no small feat.
Fortunately, your organization can implement the
same workforce optimization and sophisticated
task management solutions used by thousands of
enterprises to improve both their customer experience
(CX) and their efficiency.
For healthcare providers, this means:
• More efficient use of doctors and other high-cost
medical personnel by:
• Preserving the context and content of all
interactions between doctor and patient—
regardless of the communication channel
• Vastly improving scheduling and task
management to reduce wasted time
• Optimized scheduling of hospital beds and clinical
rooms (key to profitability) can be improved with
real-time visibility into beds that are available now
or will be in the near future
The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Resource
Management is one in a three-part series of eBooks
designed to show how an omnichannel engagement
center can significantly improve your healthcare
business. Other titles in the series include:
• The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Omnichannel
Customer Experience
• The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Revenue and
Compliance Management

EFFICIENCY OPPORTUNITIES FOR HEALTHCARE PROVIDERS
You have to manage complex operations comprising varied and distributed pieces. However, efficiencies can be uncovered—and technology can help you find them.
Let’s examine three key areas where efficiency can be improved:
WORK ITEM
ROUTING
RESOURCE
MANAGEMENT
FACILITIES
MANAGEMENT

#1
WORK ITEM ROUTING
Multiple interactions take place between all parties involved in healthcare—patient, provider, and
payer—as well as ancillary participants and vendors such as outpatient clinics, pharmacies, and
medical equipment suppliers. Being able to efficiently and effectively route tasks to those most
appropriate to complete them, and efficiently distribute or balance the workload will markedly
improve your operations.
When all tasks, regardless of communication channel (calls, email, in-person appointments, etc.),
are handled by a single routing platform, it’s easy to:
• Calculate staff utilization by channel.
• Forecast staffing needs by channel, season, illness, demographic, etc.
Healthcare providers use various methods of task routing and workload management. Some
segments, like appointment scheduling, are automated. Others, such as the way email is processed,
are more ad hoc. The goal should be to accurately inventory all work that needs to be done, assign
it a priority, and route it to the most appropriate resource equipped with the tools to respond.

#1
WORK ITEM ROUTING
Assignment and Prioritization
Each interaction type could follow a “triage” process.
Conditions categorized as “expectant” or “immediate”
are routed to emergency or urgent care. Those
classified as “delayed” or “minor” are handled by
the primary care physician. Each interaction could also
have a numeric value attached to provide ranking
within a category based on patient history and the
severity of the need.
As interactions are created and categorized, they can
then be routed to the most appropriate, available
resource. Notification to the resource (physician, nurse,
administrator) could be sent via smartphone or tablet,
with an option to ignore or delay response in the event
that a more pressing issue needs attention. If that were
to happen, the interaction would be re-routed to the
new most appropriate resource.
Each event handled by the task routing solution
is tracked by its interaction channel for accurate
classification, as well as by task duration and patient
outcome, to ensure that the right amount of time
is allocated to similar events in the future. An
accommodation could also be made for a number of
urgent, unscheduled events.

#1
WORK ITEM ROUTING
Assignment and Prioritization (cont’d)
To provide a complete picture of productivity, all
tasks handled by a physician (for example) could be
accounted for by:
• Channel (face-to-face, inbound/outbound voice,
email, web, chat, video, etc.)
• Season (cold/flu, back-to-school, etc.)
• Illness (chronic, health maintenance, etc.)
• Demographic (age, ethnicity, etc.)
Then, the provider could:
• Filter, prioritize, and push the next most important
patient to the most appropriate resource
(physician, physician assistant, nurse, etc.)
• Predict resource requirements by channel
• Forecast, schedule, and track events and resources
• Link productivity to compensation
Eventually, healthcare delivery could develop pricing
models based on communication channel. For patients
who use treatment options without seeing a doctor,
plans could offer lower cost of access. These types of
plans usually allow a certain number of escalations per
year for free, then levy a fee thereafter.

#2
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Healthcare providers typically have three knowledge workers in the back office supporting every
front-office worker. It can be quite a challenge for operations leaders to manage back-office workers
the same way they manage agents in the contact center, largely because of the amount of work in
the back office that is manual and off-queue.
Similarly, it’s tough to manage resources who have historically engaged with patients in person
(physicians and nurses). These engagement models are notoriously difficult to extend to tasks, like
email, that don’t take place in real time. However, recent developments now make it possible to
identify back-office and off-queue tasks and route them just as you would voice calls.

#2
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Workforce Management Capabilities
Advanced workforce management tools make it
possible for staff planners to juggle all activity in voice
and non-voice channels. This allows resources to move
seamlessly between tasks and channels throughout
the day. These same capabilities extend beyond
the contact center to agents, nurses, and physicians
working remotely—thus optimizing service and
minimizing costs.
Workforce Optimization Capabilities
Regardless of staff location or interaction channel,
workforce optimization tools aim to forecast, schedule,
and track activities. When agents or administrative staff
are interacting with live customers, the interactions are
usually driven by inbound and outbound call activity
that’s handled by the phone system. But off-queue
activities are equally important, and many patients use
multiple channels to engage. Workforce optimization
enables your staff to accept work from all channels
used by a patient.
This becomes especially important in determining
compensation for highly paid employees who
interact with patients across multiple channels
throughout the day. To reward top performers, some
healthcare providers are considering compensation
models that differentiate between interaction types,
volumes, response times, and outcomes. The idea
is to encourage doctors to meet with patients for
more than a few minutes during an office visit and
to also compensate them, or nurse coordinators, for
communicating with patients by phone and email—
even outside of normal office hours. Doctors could also
be compensated for helping patients manage chronic
conditions and would be encouraged to transmit
prescriptions electronically.

#2
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Reporting and Performance Tools
A range of performance management tools is needed
for visibility into real-time events as well as historical
performance. These tools calculate workload, identify
needed skills, determine training requirements, and
help you manage the workforce that’s performing
the tasks.
The reporting tools used for performance management
present information in historical and real-time format
for all resources involved in direct patient interactions,
regardless of their location. Beyond interactions with
live agents, reporting tools also consider patient
interactions handled in clinics and hospitals for phone,
email, web, chat, SMS, video, and work items. These
metrics are critical to your organization’s sustainability
and long-term growth.

#3
FACILITIES MANAGEMENT
Hospitals make money when beds are occupied. This poses at least two big challenges for
hospital administrators:
• Managing the pipeline to achieve optimal occupancy levels
• Reducing avoidable readmissions
Managing the pipeline requires real-time knowledge of the beds that are available, as well as those
likely to become available within the next 24 hours. One way to accomplish this is to understand all
of the events linked to patient discharge and ensure they are acted on in a timely manner.
For example, it’s one thing to inquire if transport is available to take a patient home or to an
outpatient care facility. It’s quite another to know that the transportation has been scheduled. If
the transportation fails to show up on time, the patient can’t be discharged, and the bed won’t be
available for the next patient.

#3
FACILITIES MANAGEMENT
Workload Distribution
Each of these decision points will likely spawn a
series of activities involving multiple entities as well
as the patient and their family. The only way to ensure
each stakeholder is aware of their responsibilities is to
implement a workload distribution system for tracking,
prioritizing, and routing tasks.
As with discharge planning, proper patient care
after discharge can dramatically reduce the odds of
re-admission. Proper scheduling and monitoring of
home health services may allow patients—who would
otherwise need non-acute residential care—to manage
their transitional care needs at home.
If discharge to an outpatient setting is not appropriate,
the discharge team must arrange transfer to another
inpatient facility for ongoing care—a multi-step activity
as well.
SLA Management
As with pipeline control, the only way to make sure all
parties understand their responsibilities after patient
discharge or transfer is by establishing SLAs for each
critical juncture to measure actual performance against
the goal of minimizing readmissions.
SLA management will, in turn, shape operational
procedures—for example, scheduling regular outbound
calls to determine if a patient is taking the right
dose of medication at the right time and that they’re
performing self-care, eating properly, and following
up with their providers. SLA monitoring can feed the
closed-loop process improvement and may provide an
early warning for patients at high risk of readmission.

CONCLUSION
Genesys, the world leader in customer engagement, would like to discuss how workforce and workload optimization, analytics, and an omnichannel communication strategy can
help you gain efficiencies and improve your patient and customer experience. Visit us at www.genesys.com.
Additional Resources
For more insights into CX for healthcare providers, check out the other two eBooks in this series:
• The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Omnichannel Customer Experience
• The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Revenue and Compliance Management

TAKE YOUR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Whether your goal is to modernize your Contact Center, increase workforce quality and efficiency or drive better
customer experiences, Genesys offers an open and scalable platform that efficiently fits into your existing enterprise
architecture and reduces total cost of ownership.
Industry leaders have achieved amazing results with the Genesys Customer Experience Platform such as:
Increase in Revenue Increase in Agent Productivity Increase in First Call
Resolution (FCR)
Increase in Net
Promoter Score (NPS)
Get Started Request a Demo Learn More
30% 50% 70% 25%

Genesys, the world’s #1 Customer Experience Platform, empowers companies to create
exceptional omnichannel experiences, journeys and relationships. For over 25 years, we
have put the customer at the center of all we do, and we passionately believe that great
customer engagement drives great business outcomes. Genesys is trusted by over 4,700
customers in 120 countries, to orchestrate over 24 billion contact center interactions per
year in the cloud and on premises.
Copyright ©2016 Genesys. 2001 Junipero
Serra Blvd., Daly City, CA 94014
All Rights reserved. Genesys and the
Genesys logo are registered trademarks
of Genesys. All other company names and
logos may be registered trademarks or
trademarks of their respective companies.
Website: www.genesys.com Contact Us: 1-888-GENESYS

The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Resource Management

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Featured

Featured (20)

The Healthcare Provider’s Guide to Resource Management