Royal Brompton & Harefield Hospitals launches a digital call tracking system that helps teams do more with less.

Royal Brompton & Harefield Hospitals (RB&HH) are the largest specialist heart and lung centre in the UK and among the largest in Europe, known throughout the world for their expertise, standard of care, and research success. Every day, both UK-based and international private patients come to RB&HH to access the care they need on their treatment journey.

"We work in a complex environment. In our hospitals, our specialists coordinate treatment from foetal cardiology to end-of-life care. We also receive queries every day from every corner of the world from patients wanting to come in for second opinions or for virtual consultations, or from other hospitals and governments who want to collaborate and train with us. So our reach is very global," said Kathryn Paradis, Associate Director at Royal Brompton & Harefield Hospitals Specialist Care.

This kind of extensive collaboration, especially when it comes to topics as consequential as healthcare, calls for a foundation that strikes a balance between efficiency and customisation: automating and streamlining workflows on the backend while enabling personalised experiences on the front end - keeping the focus on the patient.

This is what brought RB&HH to the cloud.

As the need for care expands, so does the need for operational efficiency.

Healthcare is an increasingly complex environment. Today, hospitals and providers are navigating staff shortages, budget cuts, increased demand for care (think about the increased awareness for mental health services post-pandemic), structural shifts in the industry, and more:

• In no small part due to the pandemic, government spending on healthcare increased to nearly 12% of GDP in 20211
• Hospital admissions in fiscal year 2021-22 increased by 24.7% on the prior year2
• However, NHS Hospital & Community Health Service (HCHS) staff numbers only grew by 3.5% during this same period3

1. Office for National Statistics, Healthcare expenditure, UK Health Accounts provisional estimates: 2021
2. 16 million finished admission episodes (FAE). A FAE  is the first period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one healthcare provider.
3. NHS Workforce Statistics - January 2022.

Service providers across the industry are feeling the impact from all of this and are seeking innovative ways to meet the increase in services and do more with less. In other words, organisations like RB&HH have to look for ways to streamline administrative work, monitor services provided and the revenue generated from private care, watch for trends driving patient volumes, and so on if they are to unlock new levels of operational efficiency.

It is an environment where real-time, granular data is crucial. "We wanted the kind of wide-scale visibility that comes from bringing together referrals, inquiries, occupancy numbers, test results, communication channels, and conversion rates into a single view,” said Paradis. “It's difficult to make decisions when you don't have complete data in a single view. And that starts from the very first point of patient contact: appointment booking.”

Paradis and team launched a virtual call tracking system to manage private patient bookings on Sales Cloud with implementation services provided by their chosen Salesforce partner Alscient. It is a CRM and case management system in one that gives RB&HH the tools to:

• Gather and record patient information in a patient profile during customer service calls 
• Streamline the patient appointment process via an omnichannel experience
• Track patient appointments and consultations for both the admin and clinician teams
• Share the information and documents with other teams and clinicians who might be involved in delivering care
• Automate reporting and provide data-driven insight to everything from marketing activities to revenue raised for the NHS
• Scale and adapt as service demands increased or changed

The result: more details of a patient's clinical journey, more transparency around the factors that have the biggest impact on patient care, more equipped administrative and clinical teams.

Here's how it works:

Intake and booking.

A prospective patient contacts the RB&HH Customer Services team via telephone, email, or via a webform. The agent proposes available appointments and creates a booking record for the appointment with some basic data (patient name, address, birthdate, etc.). The agent then sends an email to the patient confirming the appointment.

Next, the agent uses the booking record to register the patient with the hospital. "The system is integrated, so we can convert the booking record into a profile in the hospital system with the click of a button. Within three minutes, we've registered the patient, booked the appointment, and created the record that will be used to track the patient's journey and any related treatment revenue that will be generated," explained Hem Gorania, RB&HH Private Patient Booking Lead.

Collaboration and reporting.

All patient appointment information is centralised and accessible across teams. For example, patients can email their referral letter to the Customer Services team who then can upload it directly to the patient's profile for the treating clinician. The team can also follow up with patients to confirm appointments and reactivate closed profiles without having to ask for the same information again.

Automated reports and dashboards provide data both on schedule and on demand as needed. Because the system links patient profiles to payments, RB&HH have visibility of the revenue generated by private patient care, clinicians consulted, and trends in treatment requests. "If, for example, we notice that we're frequently scheduling a specific type of scan, that tells us that we might need another scanner. We can focus on continuous improvement that's backed by data," Gorania continued. The team also uses these reports to better understand the channels patients are using to find and connect to RB&HH, providing insight that can help the team make strategic decisions about marketing and communications campaigns.

Adaptability.

And as service demands change, "The system can be adapted to support other teams, like our international contacts or our consultant engagement tracking, without building from the ground up again," said Gorania.

The system was launched in just four months, and the team have already noted a difference in user experience both internally and externally:

1. Patients only have to provide their information once; it is then shared with all teams needing access to it. "This is helping us provide high quality service to our patients, no matter how they come to us or what services they're seeking," said Gorania.
2. Automated workflows and data consolidation has freed up time and energy for the team to focus on communications and care – not the clerical work that comes with it. "This helps us build trust with patients that we are referring them to the right contacts and getting them the right care, right away," Gorania continued.
3. Data-driven insights foster an environment of data-driven decision making. "We have more clarity around what's working and what’s driving the results. It gives us a strategic perspective to help us make decisions," shared Paradis.

"We're constantly looking for innovative ways to operate so that we can offer the very best in patient care and reach as many people as we can, while doing so with limited operational or budgetary support. We knew that using this as an opportunity to transform the way we work and collaborate now would make a real difference for the team in the long run," concluded Paradis.