Providing excellent patient care in the healthcare landscape isn’t just about connecting people with doctors and specialists. It’s also important to have the right systems in place to ensure citizens can access the guidance and support they need when they need appointments or advice.
NHS 111 is a triaging service in the United Kingdom, designed to help people access urgent care support and advice when they need it most. The organisation helps with connecting patients to out-of-hours care providers for all forms of medical assistance. To ensure patients get the right support when they need it most, the NHS 111 team needs a fantastic CX strategy in place.
London’s NHS 111 service worked with Content Guru when its call numbers began to peak, in the development of a brand-new Patient Relationship Management solution. Here’s how Content Guru helped the NHS 111 London team transform customer care.
Creating a Strategy for Handling Customer Calls
NHS 111 London uses a combination of five different call handling providers for managing non-emergency calls, as well as nine data providers for storing patient details and records. This creates a complex ecosystem, with hundreds of pieces of information rapidly moving between each system during daily interactions.
Though complicated, the technology stack is necessary to ensure frontline teams can bring various sources of data together to support patients. Unfortunately, in the past, the technology leveraged by NHS 111 London made it difficult to deliver the best possible user experience.
Patients were commonly routed directly to any available call handler. The person the individual connected with would vary each time they called the support number, regardless of the gaps between calls. Unfortunately, this often meant patients were forced to repeat their symptoms, details, and any developments in their conditions with every conversation.
Not only did this process make matters more frustrating for patients, but it also led to extended average handling times for agents, and an extremely low rate of first contact resolution. Not to mention, patients suffered from a very inconsistent experience from their healthcare service.
The previous communication environment used by the NHS 111 team also meant it wasn’t possible to track repeat callers. This prevented professionals from monitoring the development of symptoms effectively. There was no way to prioritise support for a patient with seemingly worsening conditions, or accessing faster help for those with complex, pre-existing medical conditions.
Reporting was also a major issue for the team. With a complex commissioning environment in place for handling calls and patient information, the team couldn’t maintain a clear overview of healthcare processes throughout London. This made it much harder to track unusual spikes in symptoms within specific locations. The NHS 111 London group also didn’t have a clear view of provider performance, and lacked the ability to predict potential overflow events.
Finding a Solution to Communication Complexities
Faced with unpredictable and huge peaks in patient contact, particularly during the pandemic, the NHS 111 London service needed to implement a more streamlined solution for supporting patients. The company eventually turned to Content Guru for a solution.
Content Guru’s communication experts worked with NHS 111 London to build a new “PRM” (Patient Relationship Management) system. The technology securely connects various healthcare and medical information systems to assist with automating decisions about how to route crucial interactions.