i-Sight Customer Service Software Improves Patient Satisfaction at Renowned California Hospital
Recently identified as a 100 Top Hospital, Eisenhower, in addition to clinical excellence, is now focussed on achieving top patient satisfaction scores. Customer Expressions, a leading provider of customer service software, case management software, and corrective action (CAPA) management solutions, today announced that Eisenhower Medical Center of Rancho Mirage, CA, has deployed i-Sight Customer Service and Complaint Management Software as part of a strategy to improve patient satisfaction.
OTTAWA, Canada (PRWEB) June 30, 2005 -- Customer Expressions, a leading provider of customer service software, case management software, and corrective action (CAPA) management solutions, today announced
that Eisenhower Medical Center of Rancho Mirage, CA, has deployed i-Sight Customer Service and Patient Complaint Management
Software as part of a strategy to improve patient satisfaction.
In
just two months, according to Craig Owens, the center’s Executive Vice President
and Chief Operating Officer, the i-Sight system has proved its value by
delivering significant improvements in:
- the number of patient
complaints captured;
- the timeliness of the hospital’s response to those
complaints; and
- the quality of documentation and reports
According
to Owens, the i-Sight customer service software “tells us where our problems
are and what kinds of things we need to be working on.” He adds, “It is
definitely helping us get where we want to go in terms of customer
satisfaction.”
The challenge:
Sometimes, the only thing worse than
receiving customer complaints is not receiving them. That, in effect, was the
challenge that confronted Craig Owens, Executive Vice President and Chief
Operating Officer of Eisenhower Medical Center (www.emc.org), a comprehensive healthcare institution in
California’s Coachella Valley that is renowned for its centers of excellence in
cardiovascular, orthopedics and oncology.
Recently identified as a 100
Top Hospital, Eisenhower, in addition to clinical excellence, is now focussed on
achieving top patient satisfaction scores.
Owens and other senior
managers at the center’s 253-bed Eisenhower Medical Center knew instinctively
that some of the people who received treatment at the hospital were dissatisfied
with the service they had received. But until recently, the hospital did not
have a reliable way of tracking how many people were dissatisfied, and what
exactly they were unhappy about.
At the root of the hospital’s problem
was the computer program that it had been using for several years to log
customer service inquiries and patient complaints. In theory, the system was supposed to help
Owens and his colleagues respond quickly to reports of poor service – for
example, a patient who felt he had been forced to wait too long before seeing a
doctor. “As an organization, we are passionate about pursuing a high level of
patient satisfaction,” Owens explains. “It’s like a restaurant that has a
reputation to protect. If you make a mistake and someone is upset, you want to
be able to fix that immediately.”
Unfortunately, Owens says, the patient complaint tracking and customer service software on
which the hospital had been relying simply wasn’t up to the task. For one thing,
it was so complicated and difficult to use that only two people on the
hospital’s entire staff had enough training to be able to enter service requests
and complaints into the system. Other employees who were aware of service
complaints often did not bother to tell anyone because the process for doing so
was too cumbersome. “It was as though there was a built-in deterrent in the
reporting process,” Owens says.
Owens was also frustrated by the amount
of time and effort required to analyze the complaints and generate reports.
“Every time we needed information out of the system, someone had to sit down and
write a custom report,” he says. “It was extremely time-consuming and
inefficient. The basic problem was that the architecture of the system was
closed and reprogramming cost an arm and a leg,” Owens says.
Solution:
To improve the hospital’s customer service and handling of complaints, Owens knew that it was essential to
find tracking software that was cost-effective and simple to use, yet powerful
and flexible. After researching several alternatives, he settled on i-Sight Patient Complaint Tracking Software from Customer
Expressions, the leader in web-based case management solutions.
Perhaps
the most obvious difference between i-Sight and the system it replaced is its
user-friendliness. No longer does the hospital need two specially trained
administrators to enter complaint reports; instead, approximately 40 employees
can now access the system directly from their desktop computers. In the near
future, Owens says, that number will probably rise to 80 or 90. An hour or so of
training is all that is required to become comfortable with the i-Sight user
interface. That, in turn, greatly increases the odds that a service request or
complaint will be entered into the system. It also reduces the likelihood that a
patient will have to tell his story more than once – a potentially significant
source of frustration.
As a result, says Owens, “I’m not nearly as
concerned as I was in the past about complaints slipping between our fingers.
We’ve made it a lot easier for people to report, which means we’re capturing
more of the complaints.” In only two months after i-Sight was deployed,
Eisenhower Medical Center saw a dramatic improvement in the rate of complaint
capture.
i-Sight has also significantly improved the timeliness of the
hospital’s response to complaints, by ensuring that each report is routed
automatically to the appropriate individual for investigation and action within
a specified period of time. Serious complaints are automatically escalated to a
more senior manager, “The system tells us where our problems are and what kinds
of things we need to be working on,” Owens says, “so that we can constantly
improve.” He adds that i-Sight has greatly improved the quality of documentation
and reports, which in turn makes it easier for the hospital to identify and
address problems.
Owens has a simple test for determining whether a
customer service and complaint management system is doing its job well. “At the
end of the day,” he says, “you want people’s perception of your organization to
be better than it would have been otherwise.” How does i-Sight stack up in his
view? “I think [i-Sight would meet the needs of pretty well any hospital. It is
definitely helping us get where we want to go in terms of customer
satisfaction.”
About Customer Expressions
Based in Ottawa, Canada,
Customer Expressions (www.customerexpressions.com) is a leading provider of
web-based case management solutions for regulators and enterprises focused on
quality assurance and customer service. Customer Expressions has gained an
international reputation for best-in-class software that enables managers to
improve customer retention and profitability. The privately held firm provides
i-Sight, an integrated solution for complaint handling, corrective and
preventive action management (CAPA Management), compliance monitoring and other
business processes that require case management.
About Eisenhower Medical Center
Eisenhower Medical Center is a
not-for-profit, comprehensive health care institution distinguished nationally
as a 100 Top Hospital by Solucient®, the market leader for benchmarks and trends
in business health care. Eisenhower’s campus includes the 253-bed Eisenhower
Hospital, the Betty Ford Center at Eisenhower, the Barbara Sinatra Children’s
Center at Eisenhower, and the Annenberg Center for Health Sciences at
Eisenhower. The medical center is renowned for its Centers of Excellence in
Orthopedics, Cardiovascular at the Eisenhower Smilow Heart Center, and Oncology
at the Eisenhower Lucy Curci Cancer Center. Situated on 130 acres in Rancho
Mirage, the medical center has provided a full range of quality medical and
educational services for more than 30 years for residents and visitors to the
greater Coachella Valley. For more information, visit www.emc.org. ;
For
further information, please contact:
Joe Gerard, Vice-President, Sales &
Marketing
800-465-6089
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/6/prweb256151.htm