Explore

Steer Health Communications

Problem Context

“The medical office/call center crisis, where every patient call is an expensive, manual process, is causing a lot of lost revenue and reduced patient satisfaction”

Overwhelming Inbound calls cause the following:

Staff Burnout - 20% of calls go unanswered. Staff is swamped, handling over 100 calls daily, leading to burnout and churn

Scaling is a zero-sum game - 40% of staff leave every year. Growing your practice becomes a nightmare, as every new provider requires expensive front office staffing.

Diminishing demand prevents growth - 30% of patients hang up after 1 minute on hold, and 20% of patients change providers due to long hold times. When can’t get through, they turn everywhere.

Sources:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2588437/⁠

;

Hospital & Healthcare call centers face significant costs related to misrouted calls and high employee turnover:

Misrouted Calls:

A 2020 study found that 15% of calls are misrouted due to poorly functioning interactive voice response (IVR) systems.

For a healthcare system receiving 1 million calls per year, with a cost of $1 per minute for misrouted calls, this results in a significant cost.

Misrouted calls require agents to transfer callers, which can take around 100 seconds if a consult is needed beforehand, or 65 seconds for a blind transfer. This disrupts workflow and reduces productivity.

High Employee Turnover:

Healthcare call centers report high yearly turnover of over 25% for agents.

For a 100-person call center with an average agent salary of $40,000, replacing 25% of agents at a cost of 20% of salary amounts to around $250,000 in turnover costs.

The average annual labor costs for a 100-person call center is estimated at around $4 million.

The sources indicate that misrouted calls due to inefficient interactive voice response (IVR) systems and high employee turnover contribute significantly to the operational costs of healthcare call centers. Addressing these issues through better IVR design, workflow optimization, and improving employee retention can lead to substantial cost savings.

In summary, the key findings from the sources are:

Misrouted calls due to poorly designed IVR systems lead to workflow disruptions and reduced productivity.

High employee turnover in healthcare call centers leads to increased costs for recruiting and training replacements.

Addressing IVR design and employee retention can help reduce operational costs for healthcare call centers.

Steer helps healthcare organizations transform front-office and call centers into revenue clearing a pathway for your business to grow

⁠

Reduce Call Burden & Book More Patients with Steer Health

We use AI and NLP to understand what callers need, then integrate with your EHR to resolve patient inquiries with no human needed.

Solution

Route patients to accurate points of care

Eliminate the need for complex IVR decision trees and frustrating keypad presses. Swiftly and accurately route your patients to the appropriate point of care through Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

Resolve routine patient calls from start to finish

Automate your main call drivers from A to Z with conversational AI end-to-end resolution. Solve routine requests, such as appointment scheduling, Rx management, and FAQs with zero human involvement.

Funnel repetitive requests to SMS for self service

Relieve overburdened call center teams while empowering your patients to self-serve with SMS deflection (Call-to-Text). Minimize aggravation on both ends of the phone by guiding patients to reset their password and accomplish other IT tasks without waiting on hold.

How it works?

⁠

https://coda.io/d/Steer-Health-Internal-Training-Modules_dUFoeLZJncg/Steer-IVR-Virtual-Voice-Assistant_suonF?searchClick=c72ed4df-cdb3-4ca8-bfea-99338ccad797_UFoeLZJncg#_luCMn⁠

⁠

Case Study | Results

Benefits for organizations:

Resolve or deflect over 85% of calls

Reduce your cost per call without adding to agents’ workload with AI assistants that deflect, resolve, and automatically handle everything from appointment scheduling to Rx management. Route complex cases to the right agent

Prevent costly misroutes by accurately steering cases requiring human attention to the correct agent or department while automating repetitive, routine calls.

Reduce agent burnout and attrition

Alleviate agent burnout with a digital workforce or AI agents that never sleeps. Let your teams tackle more fulfilling assignments while our AI viuce assistants take care of the monotonous low-touch work.

Benefits for Patients Cut average hold times by 99%

Drastically cut average hold times and shrink your call abandonment rates to unlock retail-like speed and quality of service that your patients demand.

Bridge patient access gaps

Help more patients, answer more calls, and offer self-service pathways to provide round-the-clock easy access to care.

Increase patient satisfaction

Watch your PSAT scores soar, foster trust and brand loyalty, and meaningfully contribute to your health system's overall patient retention and satisfaction.

3.6x call drop rate decrease

62% cost reduction

7% revenue increase

300K+ patient interactions

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.