Service knowledge management helps service agents and self service interactions become effective, timely and conclusive.
Knowledge management plays a key role in the patient access sector, as a key driver for improving the quality of information provided, with immediate access to all information required to serve a patient’s needs.
It goes without saying that the number one priority for any healthcare organisation and its staff, is patient care and delivering a successful patient experience. Close behind patient care as a priority is also to establish efficient processes throughout the organisation, which will optimise operations and enhance a healthcare organisation’s standing when providing premium levels of patient care.
The simple answer is anywhere, but the area of most importance is the first point of contact – the call centre. Like any call centre, patients expect to be provided with the highest level of customer service and add to that the fact that health and wellbeing could be on the line, the process of delivering exceptional customer service just became that much more important.
The first step in the experience of what could be a scared or emotional patient is a call to the call centre and how this call is handled is paramount to the success of a healthcare organisation
So where does a knowledge management system fit into patient care?
These calls could span a wide range of queries, from insurance coverage and claims to clinic times and patient enrolment, there is an abundance of information that needs to be correctly communicated to the patient and if the information is unavailable a correct pointer of where to go next is just as important.
Failure to get the right information at the right time can lead to patient dissatisfaction and seeking help from a rival institution.
How can knowledge management in healthcare help to alleviate these issues?
A comprehensive knowledge management system enables any organisation to harvest their knowledge for healthcare from any location and presents it to those who need it as quickly as possible. A key problem within a healthcare organisation’s call centre, is that this knowledge is frequently changing on a daily basis, therefore necessitating the need for quick and effortless content creation and maintenance from a wide range of authors.
Content changes and creation not only need to be made but they must also be conveyed to the agent with a clear notification of these changes. Notifying agents of recent updates throughout the day within a single system, is a powerful tool to streamline the activities of the agent and allows them to quickly and accurately transmit the correct information to a patient during a potentially complex call scenario.
In addition to notifying call centre staff of recent updates, agents must have the ability to readily find the information they are looking for from a vast amount of broad and varied information. Providing agents with the ability to search a knowledgebase system with Natural Language Search and using the customer’s own terminology, not only presents them with an accurate result first time, but also captures both the topic and context of patient queries, which is invaluable when looking at areas to strengthen your healthcare organisation’s knowledge.
Who else can benefit from knowledge management in healthcare?
With functionally sound knowledge base software and the right culture in place to adopt a knowledge management system, the importance of knowledge for healthcare and its benefits can be appreciated across the whole healthcare institution.
Provided that they have the privileges to do so, anybody within the organisation from consultant physicians to call centre agents, has the ability to contribute their tacit and experiential knowledge into a knowledge management system. This enables you to hone in on one of the most valuable assets of any organisation and place it at the forefront of activities when providing excellent patient care and making key business decisions.
Having this knowledge at every point of call ensures that patient satisfaction is enhanced, but also that patient retention and acquisition is maximised. This comes as a close second place to patient care when evaluating the role of knowledge management in business operations and maximising healthcare growth and innovation.
Indiana University Health Patient Access Center
The IConnect Patient Access Center within Indiana University Health, serves as IU Health Physicians central service center and is a key source of general health and clinical program information and support for the organization. Highly trained service centre staff Staff provide support for patients and provide direct phone support for primary and/or specialty clinical operations. Duties are wide ranging, including reviewing health information via Electronic Medical Record (EMR), scheduling appointments, registering patients to requesting medication refills, correspondence with clinical staff through message center, and providing general triage support.
Drivers for a Knowledge Management System
The need to provide immediate resolution to a customer’s needs requires instant access to a number of systems and, importantly, up to date clinic and physician information. Empowering the representatives with the information they needed, in the most efficient and effective way would maintain a high level of professionalism and continue to increase the quality of service. These were the key drivers for the selection of a knowledge management software.
Service Knowledge Management Tying Knowledge Together
The challenge is to make sure that each and everyone of the interactions provide prompts, accurate and concise responses to enquiries. By tying together all sources of information through service knowledge management solutions, you can ensure that the end user receive the same response regardless of channel.
The best solutions are indexing all relevant knowledge at source and making this available across all active channels including service desks, phone response teams and on-line self service. By indexing all available knowledge and serving this through multiple channels you can ensure consistency and integrity of the advice provided.
Key features that enable this include:
- Simple search capabilities supporting natural language search and user focused content listings
- Easy access to reports and tools for identifying and closing knowledge gaps
- Segmentation of access to the knowledge base through user segmentation
Design for natural language search to make it easy for the user
Service interactions whether on-line or through service agents ultimately involves a human being looking for an answer. Most critical to service effectiveness is the ability to interpret the need which is often stated as a question. Organising and indexing available knowledge in ways that allow natural language search increase the effectiveness of the service.
Natural language search with continual refinement of search results through user feedback will take the user to the best answers first. It will also increase the effectiveness of interactions across all channels as both questions and answers gets indexed and correlated together with their efficacy.
Reporting and Knowledge Base Curating Tools that Creates Focus
Any knowledge base will have gaps, either missing information or information that does not accurately address the users needs. By monitoring and reporting on the actual service interactions, information can be added or modified to ensure the most common needs are served better over time.
Why IU Health selected KPS Universal Knowledge
Universal knowledge, KPS knowledge management solutions, were chosen due to its ability to capture and maintain up to date information, with a powerful natural language search and fragment technology enabling representatives to find up to date clinic and physician information at the touch of a button. This information could be found and utilised within seconds. Being able to migrate the existing information from an in house system and supplement this with additional information quickly and easily through in built templates, was also a key benefit.
Leveraging Existing Information
Universal Knowledge’s ability to capture information previously held in an in house SharePoint repository meant that all existing information could easily be leveraged, with minimal set up time. Longer documents did not require any rework as Universal presents the best matching ‘fragments’ of each document at the point of search, again significantly reducing deployment times. Before IU Health had Universal Knowledge, representatives had to login to SharePoint, locate the correct document and then scroll through the document to find the answer. Now users simply ask a question and Universal Knowledge will return the answer immediately, saving valuable time when dealing with patients.
