How Connected Knowledge Enhances Patient Access and Experience with Rosemary Kirk

Transcript

Pete Wright:
Hello everybody and welcome to Connected Knowledge from Upland Software on TruStory FM. I’m Pete Wright.

There are many moving parts in a healthcare facility and they all center around providing the best care possible. This requires healthcare professionals to provide great experience to satisfy customer service needs that may come up. And when your customer is the very same person who is in your facility with their health, and maybe their lives in your hands, you face a heightened pressure to make sure customer satisfaction is great. Rosemary Kirk is the go-to expert for Upland Software’s knowledge management software, Panviva. She creates and presents proofs of concept for Panviva on webinars and at industry conferences, as well as facilitating pre-sales demonstrations to potential clients. She has worked in the knowledge management and customer service space for over 20 years, helping enhance user experiences through high level project management, employee training, and optimizing contact center operations.

Rosemary Kirk, welcome to Connected Knowledge.

Rosemary Kirk:
Thank you very much for having me.

Pete Wright:
So, I touched in the intro there about the pressures and complexities of healthcare facilities. Let’s kick it off with a definition. Define for us what patient access is and how important it’s to the user experience in healthcare facilities for delivering great service.

Rosemary Kirk:
Sure. Patient access is usually the first point of contact that an individual or a family would have when they’re obtaining their medical care and treatment. So, it might be something like the front desk representative or the front desk receptionist that gathers information about the patient’s demographics, their insurance, that type of thing. It might be the contact center representative that’s making outbound calls to verify your appointment, collect payment information, or even reps sending chat or text messages.

But we’ve also seen that patient access sort of, I like to say, bridges a gap between the many pieces of the healthcare puzzle because especially since the Affordable Care Act was instituted, there’s a lot of different aspects of patient wellness. There’s insurance, but there’s also the facility and the physician and the health record and clinical care and that type of thing. So, we want to make sure that there’s that single spot where patients can feel like they’re interacting with their facilities and interacting with their healthcare in an easy to manage type of way. Especially, like you said, some of these scenarios and situations are scary and life-threatening, so they want to make sure that there’s that connection there.

Pete Wright:
Can I share a horror story?

Rosemary Kirk:
Sure.

Pete Wright:
That I feel like might be in the realm of what we are talking about. My father-in-law has a replaced knee. He had his knee replaced and before he went in for his surgery, his doctor’s office called him and confirmed no fewer than six times that it was his right knee that needed to be replaced. And he thought this was ridiculous until he went to the hospital and heard from another nurse that a surgery four months ago somebody had entered the knee wrong and replaced the wrong knee on a real patient because the surgeons did not have the accurate information from the physician who treated him. And somewhere along the way, that data was lost. That’s a real thing that happens, Rosemary? I say with a shocked look on my face. So, I feel like I present that horror story, but really this impacts patient experiences in a significant way.

Rosemary Kirk:
Absolutely. Because I mean, as time and technology has advanced, and obviously we had a little thing called a pandemic, patients-

Pete Wright:
I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Rosemary Kirk:
Exactly. Patients have now become more, I think, empowered to be able to take control of where and when they receive their care. And it’s almost like patients have turned into consumers. And so now a consumer can judge how effective a healthcare center is based on that care experience. So again, a hospital might have the best orthopedic surgeon in the state, but if that patient is struggling with scheduling and referral coordination and billing and kind of to your point, good old customer service, they’ll go find another surgeon.

Pete Wright:
Can you rate hospitals on Yelp? Is that a thing? Do I even want to approach that topic?

Rosemary Kirk:
There are patient satisfaction scores and patients do not hesitate to let people know.

Pete Wright:
Oh, I’ll bet, I’ll bet.

Rosemary Kirk:
This doctor was great. But to your point, they called me eight times to try to figure out what knee it is and really you don’t know what knee it is? That type of thing.

Pete Wright:
Well, and I think that gets to the nut of this question, like why do healthcare facilities need connected knowledge and potentially why haven’t these systems been integrated better?

Rosemary Kirk:
I think the first part of the question, obviously the connected knowledge ensures that people have exactly the same information that they need when they need it. And so if a healthcare organization establishes a knowledge base that’s truly that single source of truth, then not only can all the associates have access to the same info, but patients can have access to the same information regardless of the channel that they use. So, what maybe typically got answered by different departments can now be consistent, whether the patient’s talking to an agent or scrolling through a website or interacting with a chatbot. And so, what I’ve seen is that connected knowledge can help instill that patient confidence and reassures them that the information that’s being provided is accurate and trustworthy. That being said, healthcare systems or healthcare industry traditionally tends to be kind of behind in knowledge management technology.

A hospital will spend time and money on things like medical equipment and research, and not that those are bad things. But if you take a look at their contact center, it kind of looks like a snapshot from the ’90s. Trainers are still creating PowerPoint presentations and job aids and quick reference guides and agents are putting patients on hold and there’s a team of subject matter experts manning some sort of helpline and those types of things. So, I think implementing something like connected knowledge would not only bring all of that information together, but deliver it in such a way that allows the associates to be as efficient as possible. And I’ve always been a believer of happy employee make happy customers, and I think that applies to the patients too. It’ll increase the confidence of the associate and therefore increase the confidence of the patient.

Pete Wright:
Can you comment on how Connected Knowledge helps sort of, I don’t know what the right word is, grease the skids toward compliance with digital records, sharing digital records, giving patients access to digital records? I mean, you dropped some of those terms, but I’m constantly frustrated that at the few hospitals in my area and care centers in my area that give me access to my digital record in a mobile way.

Rosemary Kirk:
Yeah. What I’m tending to see now is that integrations are connected with the health records, so then you can get access to that information. But then there’s also that knowledge base, that system that has things like the policies and the scripts and the step-by-step instructions and those types of things. What I tend to see is that knowledge bases themselves don’t tend to have personal information in them. Like an agent shouldn’t be able to look up Pete Wright in their knowledge management system. However, if the integrations are done correctly and that connected knowledge is there, then the right people get access to the right info in the right circumstance. So an agent may not necessarily be able to just have quick access to your medical record. But through authentication, it recognizes that you are you and therefore you have rights to access that type of information.

Pete Wright:
Which goes straight to customer satisfaction. If they, through a gated authentication, are able to give me access to the information I need at point of need, that makes me happy.

Rosemary Kirk:
So, that knowledge management system, again, isn’t going to have any of that personal health information in it. But it’s going to have everything that say an agent needs to ensure that they’re verifying the patient’s identity correctly. Everything from when your dad went in for that operation, probably several people at several points asked him, “What’s your name? What’s your date of birth?” Those types of things. So, it’s just ensuring that all of those regulations are in place and delivered to the associates in such a way that it’s easy for them to be able to access and still be compliant, but still to your earlier point, maintain that customer service, maintain that feeling of, “Oh, I’m not just a number on a tray being moved through the next surgeon line kind of a thing. I’m an actual person, but I recognize that these rules are in place for a reason and those types of things.”

Pete Wright:
So, for facilities who have yet achieved connected knowledge, what are the kinds of things that you’re seeing that they’re running into? What are the ceilings that they’re bumping their heads on?

Rosemary Kirk:
They’re scared. They’re nervous. Like I mentioned before, healthcare industry tends to be a little behind when it comes to that sort of thing.

Pete Wright:
So, they’re just nervous about the change in general?

Rosemary Kirk:
I think it’s nervousness about the change. It’s nervous about trusting. Trusting the content. Trusting the associates. Healthcare facilities, based on my experience, still very much function in silos. So I think there’s this idea of, “Oh, well, my department does it this way, that department can do it a completely different way.” Yes, there are regulations that sort of oversee all of it, but you’re going to get a different experience if you go to location A versus location B, which it shouldn’t be that way. It should be especially of an overarching healthcare facility type thing. So I think that there’s, again, nervousness about whether the information they have is up-to-date. Is it accurate? Is it appropriate? Is it even documented? We still have a lot of healthcare and industries or healthcare facilities out there that have people who have been doing the job 10, 20, 30 years. So it’s all in their head. It’s all more of what a colleague of mine calls tribal knowledge as opposed to thinking about knowledge as being collective rather than individual. The associates will have more confidence if they know that everything at their fingertips is up-to-date and accurate and appropriate. And they can be empowered to be able to convey that information.

I mean, I’ve heard on plenty of your podcasts before talking about the stress of contact center workers sitting there for eight hours taking calls and making sure that they’re under four minutes and all other stuff with all of this kind of scary conversation going on about whatever the medical procedure might be and those types of things.

So to have that same agent who’s hearing the six seconds kind of tick away in their ear, they’re hopping from screen to screen. They’re trying to find information that, I think I saw it yesterday, but I don’t remember where it lives or what it’s called, and all of that sort of thing. So it’s just I think taking the time to really think about what that associate needs at their fingertips and finding the best solution to be able to deliver that. So, you’re lessening that cognitive load on that poor agent and ensuring that the customer services is there.

Pete Wright:
Right. Well, and it feels so much like healthcare facilities are sometimes Legos built out of Legos of clinics that have come together over years and whose systems are not tied together. And it feels like there might be a sense of loss of control by giving up some of the barriers between systems. But, something we’ve talked about time and again on this show is how important it is to give the agents the information they need to be able to act at point of need, as I just said.

That’s something from a knowledge management perspective that I feel like might be a significant challenge. Because I think the complaints we hear from people, just ask anybody, the complaints you hear from people about going to a healthcare facility is to your point earlier, you have to tell them your name, your social security number, your phone number, your address, which knee it is nine times before you actually are transferred to the clinic that needs to actually do the work. And that’s something that I feel like finding out where those transoms are between handing off system to system is something that knowledge management and connected knowledge is uniquely suited for, even in a space of security, gated authentication, those sorts of environments. Am I saying anything that sounds like a lie to you?

Rosemary Kirk:
No, that’s completely spot on. That’s absolutely what we’re seeing as well, and especially because lately there’s been such high turnover in a lot of industries, but healthcare in particular. I mean, we mentioned the pandemic earlier. I think during that time a lot of different occupations sort of got labeled as essential. And some of those folks sitting in contact centers working for those healthcare facilities, they weren’t really feeling the love. So, when it reached a point where it was like, you still want me to take all these calls and yet remember all this stuff and click around, yet smile and make sure that you’re doing this for your patient satisfaction scores and all this stuff, they just-

Pete Wright:
And watch the clock, but don’t watch the clock. Right. Right.

Rosemary Kirk:
And the number of contact centers that I’ve worked in, too many to mention and too many years to mention, but there’s always that common saying of “they’re the front line, they’re the face of the industry, they’re the face of the organization,” that type of thing. And I think honestly, if that were true, then healthcare leadership would give the reps the respect that they deserve, but also provide them the tools that they need to work effectively.

Pete Wright:
I mean, you work with a lot of organizations in your day job. Can you give me a use case? Can you give me an example of a healthcare facility that’s just nailing it?

Rosemary Kirk:
Yeah. We’ve got, actually, I spoke earlier this week with a customer down in Georgia. Their contact center service levels have jumped. They were in the ’50s before they implemented and now they’re in the ’90s. We’ve got quite a few healthcare facilities—especially large hospitals—that are reducing their training time, sometimes shaving off two weeks, which is an eternity when you’re thinking about sometimes in training, especially with the high turnover. You want to make sure that people feel like they’re confident and that they’re not just going to give up halfway through training and walk out the door. And what I’ve been seeing, especially again over the last probably two or three years, healthcare organizations are trying to steer away from that concept of having a nesting period. You know, go and sit and listen to this rep take calls for days if not weeks type of a thing.

Sometimes that’s just not logistically possible anymore. But it’s also sometimes just a waste of time. So I think Connected Knowledge and the solutions that we have enable that shift to reduce the training time, focus on more of concepts rather than everybody click okay, that type of thing. And getting away from things like the PowerPoints and everything, having everything all in one spot. As I said before, having that kind of collective knowledge as opposed to an individual, how does Jane do it versus how does Judy do it type thing. So I think the new hire now has a lot more confidence right away because they know that everything that they need is at their fingertips regardless of the scenario that might happen.

Pete Wright:
That’s the money point right there. And in my days in the call center, it was the reason I would nest is because so much of the institutional knowledge was being fed to me for my memory. It was being fed to me because I had to know it inside and out. And now to start, I don’t have to know it. I need to know how to get it. And that’s a very different skill.

Rosemary Kirk:
Absolutely.

Pete Wright:
Very different skill. That’s beautiful. Let’s talk about doing an integration. How do you start a healthcare organization given all of the complexities and challenges that we have? What’s 8:00 AM day one look like?

Rosemary Kirk:
Yeah, and I think that goes back to that nervousness. I think a lot of healthcare organizations get kind of scared. They like the idea of collected knowledge and having knowledge management tools and such, but there’s this sort of fear. I hear constantly somebody say, “Well, this is how many documents we have now. So, how long will it take to migrate into the new knowledge management system type thing?” And it doesn’t always work that way. The way that I tend to think of it is we all have that drawer in the kitchen that collects random things—chip clips, rubber bands, ketchup packets, that kind of thing. If you buy a new house and you’re moving, you don’t typically just take that drawer and dump it into a new drawer in your kitchen. You usually take the time to go through and see what do you need, what do you do to throw away, what are you keeping, What can live in a different spot? That’s sort of how-

Pete Wright:
Listen to you. You’re a regular Rosemary condo right now.

Rosemary Kirk:
But that’s typically how I look at things like implementing knowledge management is it’s not a lift and shift. And that mentality I think is slowly starting to go to the wayside when it comes to healthcare industries. I think they’re starting to realize that garbage in, garbage out kind of thing where you really should look at what does that associate need at their fingertips, but also do things like have buy-in. I think a lot of times the leadership role is kind of overlooked, meaning that they go and they buy this cool thing, this new knowledge management system, and then they sort of send out a memo that says, “All right, we’re now implementing this—go.” But then you never hear from them again.

Where I think there should be this sort of “what’s in it for me” perspective from everybody else that has to use that system coming from the leadership of this is what our vision is of knowledge management and connected knowledge. This is what success should look like. Getting buy-in from everybody on every level of the org chart so it becomes more of a new culture as opposed to a shiny new tool that they’re utilizing.

Pete Wright:
Getting the people who actually have to touch the thing every day to answer the question—how do you see this working, right?

Rosemary Kirk:
Yes.

Pete Wright:
How do you see it working for you?

Rosemary Kirk:
And letting them know that it is working. If they’re seeing things like the increased patient satisfaction scores or better service levels and everything, then don’t give them a cheesy gift card or potluck dinner or something like that. Actually acknowledge that your hard work, and utilizing these tools that we’ve given you kind of a thing, is now equaling this type of success. So I think it sustains that motivation and that buy-in.

Pete Wright:
Well, to your earlier point, patient sat is one thing and it’s great to watch those numbers go up, but how soon do you find or do you find these best in class healthcare facilities reporting on any sort of connective tissue between connected knowledge and retention? We’re keeping the most important people, our frontline call center workers, on calls because they like their jobs better because they have the tools they need.

Rosemary Kirk:
Right. And I’m seeing people being able to really start measuring return on investment anywhere from as early as 30 days after implementation to 60 or maybe 90 days. So they’re able to instantly see that, “Oh,” now that they have all of that at their fingertips, they’re still taking the call in four minutes, but they’re not putting anybody on hold though—it’s a better conversation. And that’s actually something that I’m welcoming a lot of healthcare facilities because we had a couple that have come to us saying, “You know what? We’re not even going to look at the AHT anymore, the handle time.”

Pete Wright:
Yeah, handle time. Sure.

Rosemary Kirk:
We want to make sure that the patient is getting every question that they might have answered and that they’re reassured that they don’t think we might mess up the right knee from the left, those types of things. So a lot of times there’s that, again, it’s a culture shift, but it’s got to come from the leadership down of it’s okay that the first call resolution number will go up because that patient’s getting everything they need in that one interaction as opposed to calling back and being, “I don’t think Pete knew what he was talking about. So can you answer this question for me too?” And those types of things.

Pete Wright:
How dare you besmirch my reputation, Rosemary, we just… I’m trying my best. I’m smiling and I’m watching the clock. All right, well, let’s pivot a little bit and talk about Upland’s entry into this space. You work on Upland’s knowledge management product. Tell us all about it and how it can help achieve these goals for our healthcare facility partners.

Rosemary Kirk:
Absolutely. So yeah, Upland actually has three different knowledge management products. One is called BA Insight. It’s kind of a web-like advanced search for the entire enterprise. It kind of deploys searches within the organization’s existing infrastructure. And so it can kind of produce what they call a single index with all the kind of required information, but it also can do things like federated search in document management and files and such. So we tend to see that being used a lot in legal industries, life sciences, those types of things.

We’ve got another great product called RightAnswers. That is a KCS methodology verified type knowledge management software. It’s got a great AI enabled search, so it can also crawl through different repositories and such. But it also can integrate with things like ServiceNow, JIRA, Zendesk, that type of thing. And it really allows users to collaborate through things like community forums and work together to create and improve the knowledge together collectively.We tend to see that that’s often widely used and quite appreciated and successful in tech support, product support, those types of things—industries that are looking to improve things like resolution time or maybe increase their self-service.

But as you mentioned before, I’ve been working for a little over a decade now with the other knowledge management product called Panviva. That’s a more process guidance type of knowledge management solution. And it’s definitely designed more for compliance. So, we’re very popular in highly compliant industries like finance and healthcare. But it’s a system that’s often used as the training manual and that on-the-job resource. And it really kind of goes back to the topic we talked about before where associates feel empowered to be able to confidently and consistently answer the very complex questions that come in an ever-changing highly compliant industry. So, we also have these great APIs that can then deliver knowledge through the chatbots, IVRs, websites, other digital channels. So it’s really recognizing the different audience and the different channels that they may utilize. But like we said before, keeping that information consistent and connected.

Pete Wright:
I think that that is the greatest surprise when you see the connected knowledge. You drop IVR and it has such a stereotype about just being bad and frustrating. They’re getting really good now.

Rosemary Kirk:
They’re getting really good now.

Pete Wright:
They’re getting so good. And you could tell. You call a financial institution or a hospital and you get the IVR and you realize, “Oh my gosh, it just answered my question. That is amazing. I feel better that I was able to do it and I found the person or the clinic I needed right away.” It’s stunning. I’m irrationally exuberant about knowledge management after we record these episodes. I’m so grateful for you being here, Rosemary, thank you so much.

Rosemary Kirk:
Absolutely, my pleasure.

Pete Wright:
So I’m going to put links to… We’ll go ahead and put links to all the things you dropped right here, but do you have any specific points of interest that you’d like to make sure we highlight for people specifically in the healthcare space we can put in the show notes?

Rosemary Kirk:
Well, I think a lot of the information that we’ve been talking about has been kind of general to knowledge management. But specifically I think that that solution that we discussed of Panviva has been really something that’s been helping healthcare industries in the US really become successful with not only their knowledge management initiative, but really kind of stepping into the 21st century. Because like we talked about before, that patient confidence, they might not even know that a hospital has best-in-class equipment because all they’re seeing is somebody rifling through a PowerPoint or hearing the paper shuffle when they’re talking on the phone, and they’re scared that they don’t know the right knee from the left. So, I think that Panviva has been pretty integral in helping a lot of healthcare facilities bring all of that together and improve a number of different metrics. Like we said, not only patient satisfaction, but the training and the attrition and all of those types of things too.

Pete Wright:
Wonderful. Rosemary Kirk, thank you so much.

Rosemary Kirk:
Thank you.

Pete Wright:
And we appreciate all of you fair listeners for downloading and listening to this show. Thank you all for your time and your attention. We’d love to hear what you think. Just swipe up in your show notes and look for the feedback link to send questions to us or any of our past guests and we will do our best to get them answered. We’ve got questions coming in and I think, I hope I’m not speaking out of turn here, but I think we have a Q&A episode coming. We have enough questions for a whole episode answering questions from past episodes, so keep those questions coming. Let’s build up a nice repertoire of questions that we can ask our past guests. Thank you everybody. On behalf of Rosemary Kirk, I’m Pete Wright, and we’ll see you right back here next week on Connected Knowledge.