Healthcare in an increasingly remote world

Grounded from travel, I am working to put myself in my customer’s shoes. What do hospitals, medical device manufacturers and health plans need most now? Well, it appears to me that key common goals are as follows:

• Minimize staff in the call center. THEREFORE, increase self-service.
• Increase the ability for all to work remotely, less staff manning command centers, operations centers. THEREFORE, increase remote monitoring.
• Move quickly to adapt to the new normal. THEREFORE, deploy quickly.
• Provide excellent customer service. THEREFORE, reduce stress on patients who are chronically ill.

Working remote in healthcare

Leor Brenman of Axway’s Griffin Lab recent blog about adding remote monitoring seems to fit all these objectives nicely. In today’s world, our patients rely on us to provide services, regardless of the environmental challenges.

One way we can do that is by taking advantage of the increasingly connected internet of things (IoT) and Axway’s AMPLIFY™ suite. Leor shows us how in his blog, providing either hospital-based monitoring or home health monitoring. It doesn’t matter where the device is physically located. If the device transmits status messages through wireless communication, we can monitor and act.

Thinking about notifications as a service is important to our goals as is avoiding email fatigue and messages landing in junk folders instead of inboxes.

Overall, it seems a new approach to the notification is key to reducing everyone’s stress. With more organizations and products thinking API-First, we can notify without the reliance on email.

MS Teams

In his blog, Leor uses Microsoft Teams (other collaboration products could be used too) as an organizing tool for responses. MS Teams enable us to set up groups for various purposes such as service and repair, customer complaints, etc. Teams receive the notification. MS Teams allow us to pick quickly up messages with less bandwidth and synchronization challenges than email. Additionally, we can post notes for our remote colleagues and act as a team regardless of our physical location.

Here is another key point. Note how the program automatically sends a link to the user’s manual. It is simple to build in intelligence like this.  Why wait for a human to respond? Sending the manual proactively will enable many to correct the problem without further delay. This will reduce call center traffic by allowing a percentage of those impacted to solve their issues.

This example has, of course, a relatively simple and direct solution. But think a bit more, haven’t you armed your call center with a set of actions for common problems and issues? Why not proactively share that information with your community when a problem is detected? Why wait until someone calls to help them?

Hybrid integration technology

Reaching out proactively with prescriptive actions will speed resolution reducing call waiting so that the call center team can focus on complex symptoms and situations instead of providing rote responses to common issues. Using hybrid integration technology to reduce costs, ease the workload of our teams and improve customer satisfaction-–is what we need to deliver healthcare today.

I hope you enjoy reading Leor’s blog post as much as I did. The idea that our hybrid integration platforms can use Open APIs to change the game is exactly what we need to do:

• If we want to work remotely AND work efficiently.
• If we want to provide self-service capabilities to our customers and patients.
• If we want to adapt quickly to the new normal.
• WHILE delivering improved experiences.