Johns Hopkins Healthcare System (JHHS) elevates the patient experience

Johns Hopkins Healthcare System (JHHS), the worldclass health care system, is committed to caring for patients and communities using a comprehensive range of state-of-the-art programs, practices and tools. The organization is consistently recognized as one of America’s best hospitals by U.S. News World & Report. The academic health system consists of six hospitals across Maryland, Washington D.C. and Florida, offering a broad range of inpatient and outpatient services as well as long-term care to nearly 3 million visiting patients each year.

System siloes can affect personalized care delivery and staff efficiencies, and JHHS wanted to integrate its Electronic Health Records (EHR) system with their Contact Center so that patients contacting the health system have a personalized and expedited experience. This is when Avaya worked with JHHS to engineer an integration between the organization’s EPIC Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solution and Avaya’s Contact Center and Automation portfolio to improve patient interactions and handling.

"We wanted to improve operational efficiencies and deliver a seamless patient experience,” explained Ruth Spangler, Project Director at JHHS. “Bringing Avaya and EPIC together could help us achieve those goals.”

The integration capabilities include:

Identification and Validation Automation

Avaya, by gathering patient information and passing this to EPIC, automates the identification and validation of a patient and provides JHHS patient services representatives who answer calls with automatic access to patient information that pops up on their screen when calls come into the health system. This means that the moment the patient and representative are connected, the right EPIC screen is available to the agent for them to better service the customer. This is a substantial time and cost saver for JHHS, which has nearly four hundred fulltime agents fielding calls from patients, primarily with appointment scheduling requests.

Survey routing

After any appointment conversation is completed, patients are routed to a speech-based survey to gauge their satisfaction with the handling of their appointment request. “This allows us to more quickly and accurately monitor satisfaction, coach agents and target future improvements,” said Spangler. The organization can get real-time customer feedback and share this with agents and management

CRM integration

By automating EPIC integration with the Avaya CRM Connector, JHHS patient service representatives can now click to call, transfer, consult with the practices to drive first call resolution, and reduce handle times. “Patients calling JHHS have an improved experience with our efficiency in handling and processing calls,” said Spangler. “We now have tools to improve the interactions between our patient access center and other Hopkins departments.

Engaging Avaya

“Given Avaya’s strong ability to engineer healthcare centric automation applications, it made sense for JHHS to engage Avaya to deliver this integration,” said Spangler.

“Their application integration team consisted of knowledgeable, responsive, professional and flexible team players,” she observed. “The project manager was organized and responsive and went the extra mile on more than one occasion. The entire team worked resourcefully to get the product into testing and production in the required timeframes.”

“The Avaya team worked well partnering with the EPIC team and the JHHS Telecom and IT departments,” Spangler said.