In its pursuit of a seamless patient experience, Bon Secours Mercy Health modernized its service operations. The healthcare provider has seen a 10% increase in revenue generated per agent, a 13% improvement in appointments scheduled per week and 20–30 seconds handle time saved per call, as a result.
10% increase
in revenue generated by the contact center
13% improvement
in appointments scheduled per week by the contact center
30-plus second savings
in handle time per call
Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH), a leading US healthcare system, has a clear vision for its patient experience, which includes enhancing the care experience, improving health outcomes and reducing the cost of care.
These are substantive goals that could be challenging for as organization as distributed as BSMH. With 49 hospitals and over 60,000 employees, including 3,000 physicians and advanced clinicians, it provides primary, specialty and urgent care to communities across four US states. But the healthcare organization has a detailed plan mapped out to reach its customer experience (CX) goals.
Achieving this vision includes meeting patients on their preferred channel, while also enhancing agent interactions. It also includes modernizing its operations, improving efficiency and streamlining the patient journey. BSMH leveraged the Genesys Cloud™ platform, Epic and other technologies to help enable these outcomes.
“As many industries make the shift to digital self-service tools, our priority is to offer those benefits to our patients, too,” said Adam Kirkendall, Director, Technology and Analytics Medical Group at BSMH, which operates as a Catholic not-for-profit ministry. “As such, we’ve focused on developing more self-service scheduling options, both digitally via a mobile phone and our website, while also pursuing automated voice capabilities.”
“There was a 13% improvement in appointments scheduled per week by the contact center, which translates to an increase in revenue generated by the contact center of about 10% after copilot license costs. And that’s one way I view success…. I want to make sure we’re generating something net positive for us with any implementation.”
Adam Kirkendall
Director, Technology and Analytics Medical Group, Bon Secours Mercy Health
BSMH is taking a thoughtful and well-planned approach to modernizing its customer experience operations. Much of the work has been divided into three phases. This enables the healthcare provider to better track its expected outcomes and measure success as it moves forward within each phase and across them.
The first phase focused primarily on getting patients to the right resources faster. It included implementing voice assistance and enhancing the IVR to better enable self-service. It has also adopted Health CX and integrated it with its Epic medical records system. This enables agents to view Genesys Cloud Agent Copilot within the Epic embeddable framework. The goals of this phase included optimizing IVR call flows and improving the patient experience by providing faster response time and issue resolution, as well as quicker access to care.
The second phase is centered on shifting call volumes from the primary care practices to the self-service channels or the contact center and upskilling agents to support that shift. This phase includes using AI-powered agent copilots to provide agents with real-time guidance on complex appointment scheduling. It also includes implementing AI-enabled knowledge surfacing tools and after-call work automation. Goals for this phase include increasing the agents’ productivity and improving scheduling in the main scheduling center, so individual practices can focus on patient care. Both should lead to enhanced service quality.
The third phase is focused on meeting patients in their channel of choice, thus increasing digital engagement. The technology involved in this phase includes conversational IVR AI assistance, live webchat, SMS messaging and digital chatbots. The goals include simplifying the IVR experience by streamlining navigation, expanding the service channel mix and personalizing the patient experience in their preferred channel. This should increase patient engagement and satisfaction while reducing costs.
“We’re looking at meeting patients on their preferred channel, providing effective self-service solutions across channels, and looking for that experience to be as conversational as possible.”
Adam Kirkendall
Director, Technology and Analytics Medical Group, Bon Secours Mercy Health
BSMH wanted a contact center solution that could meet its goals of enhanced digital self-service and integration while supporting a growing remote workforce. Key opportunities included improving patient access through self-service options, consolidating systems for better efficiency and reducing operational costs.
The healthcare organization uses Genesys Cloud to help its 250 US and Philippines-based agents handle about 180,000 monthly contacts, scheduling primary and specialty care services with maximum efficiency. Additionally, callers can now easily serve themselves via an Epic-integrated voice assistant. These initial changes have already contributed to a 2% customer satisfaction increase.
“The voice assistants are changing our patient experience, shortening the patient interaction with an agent,” said Kirkendall. Enabling authentication in the IVR has cut about 20 to 30 seconds off call handle time.
That success opened the door for BSMH to provide more self-service interactions. “About 4% of callers now self-serve for appointment information,” added Kirkendall. “Shortly, they’ll be able to book, reschedule, cancel and confirm 24/7 via our IVR, which will greatly increasing patient access and service automation.”
BSMH has taken a cue from the ability for patients to self-schedule that the Epic MyChart tool provides. “We’re looking at meeting patients on their preferred channel, providing effective self-service solutions across channels, and looking for that experience to be as conversational as possible,” said Kirkendall. Conversational AI is important, he added, and so is providing prompts in a conversational flow that makes sense.
Using Genesys Cloud has helped BSMH achieve other noticeable benefits, which include improved business continuity and a greener contact center model — due to less commuting and lower IT-generated carbon emissions.
“We became a fully remote workforce, and our new platform allows us to manage that sustainable environment effectively,” said Kirkendall. “For example, when we had an outage that impacted our patients, we put up a message and updated routing across all our locations within 10 minutes.”
“Genesys WEM enabled us to bring WFM, quality assurance, call recordings and analytics into one place and application.”
Adam Kirkendall
Director, Technology and Analytics Medical Group, Bon Secours Mercy Health
BSMH further improved the patient and agent experience by implementing agent copilot and powerful workforce engagement management (WEM) capabilities. Agent copilot, built on Amazon Bedrock, has helped to streamline complex appointment setting while enhancing the agent experience. And Genesys Cloud WEM has provided better visibility into the data needed to quickly understand issues and opportunities in agent-led interactions.
Scheduling healthcare appointments can be complex — especially for agents not familiar with all the medical terminology they might need or if patients word requests differently than expected. Agent copilot knowledge article pops and prompts have helped enable agents to be more successful. As a result, there was an uptick in QA scores and a profitable boost in performance.
“There was a 13% improvement in appointments scheduled per week, which translates to an increase in revenue of about 10% after copilot license costs. And that’s one way I view success,” said Kirkendall. “I want to make sure we’re generating something net positive for us with any implementation.”
This success is a positive step toward increasing the percentage of calls that route to the contact center or self-service channels (rather than individual practices) from 25% to 50%. Kirkendall plans to ensure that agent copilot is so successful that the practices will trust the contact center to handle more complex calls effectively. This will also improve the patient experience because the practices can’t always answer calls quickly at busy times.
Having advanced WEM capabilities will help provide the data Kirkendall and his team need to show and share the scheduling agents’ successes. The employee-centric solution is also providing notable cost savings.
“Genesys WEM enabled us to bring WFM, quality assurance, call recordings and analytics into one place and application,” said Kirkendall.
Previously, the analytics team at BSMH had to complete extensive manual data entries to Tableau tools to plug reporting gaps. Built to the same security standards as Genesys Cloud, Analytics as a Service (A3S) now seamlessly integrates with Snowflake for deep-dive reporting, data sharing and customized Tableau dashboards. The result is more automated and streamlined workflows, as well as greater efficiency in call scoring and increased access to quality scores.
“Genesys A3S allows our teams to deep dive and access quality scores in ways they can’t using out-of-the-box tools,” added Kirkendall. “Speech and text analytics are proving to be another game changer as we dig in to improve calls, better understand the patient experience and target problem areas to help drive faster service improvements.”
“Genesys A3S allows our teams to deep dive and access quality scores in ways they can’t using out-of-the-box tools. Speech and text analytics are proving to be another game changer as we dig in to improve calls and better understand the patient experience.”
Adam Kirkendall
Director, Technology and Analytics Medical Group, Bon Secours Mercy Health
Building on this success, the joint project team is developing a technology roadmap to meet the healthcare provider’s objectives over the next two years.
The team’s plans include adding the ability to route SMS conversations from an inbound call flow and expanding self-service options via voice assistants that enable patients to easily schedule, reschedule, confirm or cancel an appointment at any time. And BSMH is looking to expand the chatbot offerings on its two main websites.
The healthcare provider is also planning to add additional Genesys Cloud integrations with payment and prescription applications to further streamline patient interactions.
More AI-based innovations are also on the roadmap. Following positive gains from an initial pilot, BSMH intends to conduct further tests of Genesys Cloud Predictive Routing.
“We are working to meet patients on their preferred channel, whether that’s through self-service, chat or SMS,” concluded Kirkendall. “Our roadmap reflects our commitment to ensuring quality health outcomes while also making care more accessible.”
To learn more about the solutions featured in this case study, visit www.genesys.com.
