Offering help through the toughest times

Downtime isn’t an option

With 900-plus staff across 45 locations, Integral Care helps people build health and wellbeing, so everyone has the foundation to reach their full potential. In addition to supporting adults and children living with mental illness, the agency provides a 24-hour Crisis Helpline that’s often the first point of contact for people needing immediate emotional support. It’s complemented by other key services, such as ongoing counseling to improve mental health, drug and alcohol treatment for recovery, and housing to regain health and independence.

However, technology issues degraded service levels. “Our legacy on-premises contact center system was unreliable, hard to scale, and expensive to maintain and add features,” said Sunila Levi, CIO at Integral Health. “On average, we used to suffer two or three outages a month — each lasting 15 minutes to 5 hours, and additional hours/weeks on identifying root cause analysis (RCA) of these outages. During that time, we’d be unable to answer critical calls, which was totally unacceptable.”

No more missed calls

Timing of the migration was crucial as feelings of isolation, stress and job threats multiplied. “When COVID-19 struck, we set up a special hotline but were still forced to socially distance in the office,” said Teresa Williams, Director of Clinical Programs at Integral Care. “We’re grateful Genesys was able to prioritize and move us over so quickly. They jumped on issues like number-porting and we felt well-supported throughout.”

Custom-built for the job

Genesys Cloud open APIs reduce effort for the Integral Care IT staff. Contact center functionality has been integrated with the agency’s Netsmart myAvatar electronic health system, improving workflow management and clinical support decision-making. And integration with Microsoft Teams makes it easier for case managers to conduct telehealth video calls with clients and collaborate effectively with other agencies.

In addition, call workflows have been customized to automatically connect non-native-speaking clients with translators. And not only does Integral Care handle calls coming through its own helpline, it also receives traffic from calls to the National Suicide Prevention lines originating in 60 Texas counties. The Genesys Cloud platform intercepts and routes calls containing neighboring area codes automatically, making best use of local knowledge and resources.

Simple management and proven resilience

Previously, system crashes often meant there were up to 91 abandoned calls a month. When this happened, agents had to physically go into the system to retrieve numbers and call clients back. In the first month of using Genesys Cloud, there were only two abandoned calls — a 97% improvement.

“We used to spend every Friday planning for the worst,” said Williams. “Now, we just want to have a big party. Since moving, we’ve had three instances of internet and Active Directory server outages. But Genesys Cloud just kept on going, enabling agents to continue to take helpline calls.”

IT management also is much simpler, now requiring one internal engineer as opposed to the dozen or so external support staff needed before. “It’s been a wonderful journey so far,” added Levi. “The amount of time Genesys took to make sure everything was set up correctly has really paid off. For each of those three incidents, we would have had hours of downtime and interminable meetings to fix the problem.”

Access to facts makes a difference

Genesys reporting tools offer the newfound ability to drill down and visualize the effects of small changes. Agents can also search for keywords. “We used to ask agents to fill in tally sheets,” said Williams. “Now, we can quickly identify how many times people say words like COVID, homeless or abuse. So, it’s easier to apply for funding or accelerate awareness in a specific area backed up by hard facts.”

Integral Care has a better foundation for growth, drawing on the elasticity of its cloud architecture to rapidly add seats and capacity to extend services, for example. In 2019, it provided 595,918 service instances to 29,733 people across all of their programs for mental health, substance use disorder and intellectual and developmental disabilities. This included over 69,000 calls to the 24/7 Crisis Helpline — up 13% over the previous year.

With COVID-related calls, the agency has seen those volumes rise by 12% so far this year. During this time, monthly appointment bookings for individuals in Austin-Travis County have risen from around 7,000 to more than 10,000.