In this episode

Noreen Friel is Director of Call Center Operations at Main Line Health. At MLH, she’s led initiatives to solve challenges that many health system contact centers face today:

• High call volumes (especially for straightforward scheduling requests that could be done via patient self-service)
• Challenges with recruiting and staff retention
• Evaluating operational changes and technology solutions to help contact center efficiency.

Friel discusses MLH’s strategies for addressing these challenges, and how she’s seen significant improvements from decanting lower-complexity calls from the contact center.

“You can’t just keep up-staffing and pulling people in. It’s not even just a matter of having enough people to answer the phones. It’s about retaining individuals and [ensuring] the quality of their work.”

– Noreen Friel

Key takeaways

Main Line Health has four acute care hospitals and multiple ambulatory clinics in the Philadelphia region, and recently transitioned to a centralized contact center. But high call volumes and effective remote work remained challenging. MLH’s Director of Call Center Operations, Noreen Friel, discusses strategies that made MLH’s contact center more efficient, while improving the patient and staff experience.

Centralized contact centers with remote staff can be successful.

MLH now uses a centralized contact center where staff work remotely. Friel discusses that adjusting how calls are monitored and clearly communicating expectations with staff has allowed MLH to be successful with this model. “We really make sure that everybody has the tools and resources they need to work remotely, they understand the expectations of working remotely. And then we monitor all of those expectations more, and differently, than we did before when we were all in one space.”

Deflecting straightforward calls is a key strategy for handling high call volumes.

MLH uses Luma to allow patients to self-schedule straightforward mammograms and DEXA scans when they call in, rather than waiting on hold. Implementing this technology, plus decanting some calls to an external staffing resource, has helped MLH’s contact center handle high call volumes.

“Taking those mammo and DEXA calls off our team — which were a lot — lessens the burden on central scheduling and allows the central scheduling team to focus on more complicated calls. [The scheduling team can now focus more on] MRIs, CTs, nuclear medicine, perinatal testing — all the different service lines that we have under the imaging umbrella.”