Customer Background & Challenge
Access to care at Cone Health’s Pulmonary Care service was a major pain point. Appointment inaccuracies, reliance on oral and paper-based instruction, and call wait times stretching up to 20 minutes created frustration for both patients and staff. The clinic managed nearly 400 calls each day, with provider schedules released only three months in advance. Limited visibility into provider availability, challenges with referrals, and legacy scheduling processes further strained the practice and negatively impacted patients.
The Solution
Hummingbird approached this challenge with a focus on centralization, automation, and usability in partnership with Cone Health to develop their Enterprise Engagement Contact Center (E2C2). The vision of E2C2 was to provide consistent consumer experiences, increased access, and meaningful care navigation.
Documentation Modernization
Hummingbird partnered with Pulmonology to update and digitize documentation, creating a centralized knowledge management system (KMS) that reflected current workflows. The clinic staff and call center specialists now have a single source of truth, which provides instant access to critical scheduling and operational information.
Scheduling Efficiency
Hummingbird took a three-pronged approach designed to boost Pulmonology accuracy and access. The team:
- Conducted a comprehensive Pulmonary clinic assessment to understand the current state, identifying areas of opportunity.
- Performed a deep dive into provider schedules, identifying opportunities to open templates by removing unused blocks, developing auto-releasing blocks, simplifying Visit Type build, and extending the schedule release window to give patients more access.
- Conducted collaborative design sessions to create referral and decision-tree logic, helping ensure every patient is scheduled with the right provider, for the right appointment, for the right amount of time.
The combination of these adjustments increased scheduling accuracy and access for all Pulmonology appointment types.
Nurse Triage
In response to critical patient care demands, Hummingbird launched a dedicated Nurse Triage initiative within the Pulmonary specialty. Symptomatic patients once waited up to a week for a response, but now over 80% of callers in need of clinical assistance are connected with a registered nurse within just two minutes. The acceleration of access from days to minutes ensures faster intervention for high-risk patients.
Reporting Tools
New performance monitoring and real-time tracking tools enabled Pulmonology leadership to significantly reduce the administrative burden on clinic staff, allowing them to refocus on delivering an exceptional in-person patient experience.
Results and Metrics
By integrating a KMS, optimizing provider schedules, adding nurse triage and scheduling decision trees, and enhancing self-service options in a fully centralized model, more patients are being scheduled with the right providers for the correct visit type and duration. In just 3 months, 80% of all incoming calls are now answered in under 30 seconds, and there’s been a shift from 0% to 7% of all appointments being scheduled online.
Conclusion & Future Plans
Hummingbird continues to work with Pulmonary Care on ongoing optimization, with an emphasis on expanding provider template availability and enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of E2C2 call handling. These efforts are designed to drive improvements in patient satisfaction and streamline clinic and call center operations.
