Health care has been slow to accept self-service technology and currently accounts for less than five percent of the self-service technology market. Not surprisingly, technology providers are trying hard to stoke the healthcare industry’s appetite for these solutions.
Consider comments from Bill Crounse, Microsoft’s global healthcare industry manager: “Talk about a way to improve patient satisfaction, the quality of care, and get a positive return on investment,” he promised on a blog. “This is it.”
Maybe. In fact, recent health industry implementations of self-service technology have shown promise and hint at being able to cut costs. Self-service kiosks installed last year at Calgary Health Region allow employees around-the-clock access to human resources Intranet. “Work efficiencies [have] increased [dramatically]” says Lee Ann Sullivan, Calgary senior director in advance technology.
Employees are using the IBM kiosks to submit health benefit claims, check paycheck information, and access email accounts. Although Sullivan can’t yet give concrete ROI examples, she says the human resource staff has been freed up to do other work since employees can now look up much of their own information. “This wasn’t about monitoring savings as much as empowering employees with ownership of data,” says Sullivan.
Another form of self-service, voice automation systems, saved 58 hours a month for the help desk staff at Milwaukee-based Aurora Health Care when employees gained the ability to look up answers to IT questions and access online tech support anytime, according to supervisor Carol Rosmait. Using FrontRange Solutions software and support, users can log their complaints automatically and receive tentative resolution dates. She says technicians at 13 hospitals, more than 100 clinics, and 120 community pharmacies are now able to focus more attention on high-priority issues.
Allen Bonde of eVergance, a management consulting and systems integration firm, says that web-based self-service applications in particular have demonstrated some of the best ROIs for customer or patient-facing technologies; answering a question online costs 4 to 40 times less than responding through a call center or help desk. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida customers can request information, receive quotes and apply for insurance products all online, formerly a lengthy and time-consuming process involving a live agent.
No matter what type of self-service technology is being used — interactive voice response (IVR), kiosks, wireless table PCs, chat or short message service (SMS) — the reality is that self-service becomes more expensive as the complexity of the transaction increases, says Gartner analyst Esteban Kolsky.
“When companies begin to use dynamic data and leverage this data or logic in enterprise systems -- basically when data is culled or gathered from back-office systems or data repositories in contrast to data taken from static Web pages -- the cost increases dramatically,” says Kolsky.
He strongly recommends that the analysis of self-service technology costs include maintenance processes costs, and not just development and deployment costs for the interface. “Implementing self-service is seen as fast and easy, but sometimes this is true and sometimes it isn’t.” It’s also true these cost-saving systems can be frustrating for inexpert, occasional users who find navigating the nested menus difficult.
Chakri Toleti, vice president of Galvanon, Fla-based provider of kiosks, web self-service applications, and other automation technology for patient registration, says one key to a successful self-service implementation is ensuring adequate integration with existing IT infrastructures and applications, such as electronic medical records, clinical data repositories, and practice management systems. The interface should be intuitive and easy-to-use, and it should be appropriate for the workflow and care setting, Toleti says.
Heritage Valley Health System in southwestern Pennsylvania, for example, deployed desktop kiosks for patient self check-in, while tablet PCs were the technology of choice for Columbus Children's Hospital in Ohio where administration wanted to create a private screening process that patients could complete from their seats in the waiting area. There is no single solution for all settings.
“Sophisticated end users who are technology-savvy and accustomed to 24/7 service are driving the investment into self-service technology,” says Bonde. “The infrastructure is here — Web analytics and browsers, broadband, voice applications. Take advantage of the plumbing built up over the last decade and make incremental investments in self-service.”
Many observers say it’s only a matter of time before the healthcare industry catches up with retail, finance, and travel; in those industries, self-service is already an ingrained application. IHL Consulting Group says self-service machines such as kiosks are fundamentally changing the way business is done with transactions at such machines expected to reach $1.2 trillion by 2009. “All this use of technology in other fields adds up to the experience and adoption of self-service technologies by people at a hospital or clinic,” says Toleti.
Want to read more expert articles like this? Send an email to:
subscribe-digital_healthcare_productivity@newsletters.digitalhcp.com