Interim HealthCare

Home Health Provider Improves Patient Services, Lowers Operating Costs, and Fixes Its “Archaic” Communications Processes with RingCentral Cloud Solution
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Rolling out these other RingCentral capabilities will also be great for getting all three of our locations on the same page every day and making us feel like more of a team rather than three separate operations.

Claire Olson

CFO, Interim HealthCare
A thriving home health provider serving the Pacific Northwest, Interim HealthCare of Spokane, Inc. needs to stay in constant contact with its healthcare-industry clients and home healthcare staff. The company’s previous phone system lacked basic functionality like a single system for multiple locations and mobile phone support, making operations inefficient and creating frustrating experiences for both its staff and patients. After a disappointing experience with another cloud phone system, the company did a thorough investigation of business communications solutions.
Interim HealthCare’s research led to RingCentral, which had all of the functionality it considered important to its operations, earned high marks from other businesses in the healthcare space, and also offered an all-in-one communications platform the company envisioned could help it create the ideal patient experience.

Looking for a business phone solution that would address critical business needs

“After getting burned with what turned out to be an archaic phone system and going through a costly and frustrating experience extricating ourselves from that vendor, we thought carefully about what we’d need from our new solution,” explains Claire Olson, Chief Financial Officer for Interim HealthCare of Spokane, who has been with the company for more than 20 years.

Recapture lost patient revenue

“First, we needed the ability to proactively manage prospective patient calls across our multiple office locations that include Spokane, Portland, and Salem,” says Olson.
“Before, when we would get a call from a prospective patient at our headquarters, our phone system would not support an efficient transfer to the appropriate location and teams for immediate next steps and onboarding of a new patient. In fact, the headquarters teams were even handwriting notes and then calling the other locations to relay the messages. This resulted in missing or lost information, a negative prospective patient experience, wasted staff time, and, most importantly, potential lost patient revenues.”
[The ability to easily transfer calls] saves us time and reduces the chances for error, such as incorrectly copying down a phone number while taking a message by hand. It also creates a much better experience for our callers.

Claire Olson

CFO, Interim HealthCare
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
HQ
Spokane, WA
YEAR FOUNDED
1990
EMPLOYEES
100+

Responsive recruiting

The company also needed to give employees direct lines and let them forward business calls to their other phones. “Some of us travel often,” Olson explains. “When we’re on the road and someone calls for us, we don’t want to send that person to a main number and have our front-desk employees take messages and then call us on our cell phones. Because I handle recruiting, calls for me could be job candidates. I don’t want them to call the front office and then wait for my callback. I also don’t want whoever takes the call to guess about details of the job. I want these people to be able to reach me directly on my business number from the start.”

Economical scalability

Finally, Interim HealthCare of Spokane needed its new phone solution to be cost-effective. “We’re growing, but we’re still a small business with a limited IT budget,” says Olson. “We learned the hard way from our previous phone-system experience that we had to choose a solution whose costs were clear and affordable.”

RingCentral connects the ideal patient and staff experience

“With RingCentral, we’re now able to easily connect prospective patients to any of our locations,” says Olson. “This saves us time and reduces the chances for error, such as incorrectly copying down a phone number while taking a message by hand. It also creates a much better experience for our callers.” This, in turn, is assisting the organization to reduce care coordination delays across its various patient service teams.
The company is also optimizing its own staff resources while continually recruiting and adding to its teams. By combining multiple locations on one solution, securing mobile collaboration tools, and enabling staff mobile phones, now care and support teams work as one.
“We all now have direct business numbers, and it will automatically route calls to our cell phones when we’re on the road or working from home, so we never have to worry about missing important calls. This is valuable to me for recruiting because I can always give candidates my direct business number and know I’ll be able to give them accurate, up-to-the-minute information when they call about the status of a job.”
“It even helps me when I’m dealing with the employment department. When we had claims filed by employees in the past, the department would leave messages and give us a certain number of hours to respond, or they’d automatically close the case in favor of the claimant. That could cost us a lot of money. But now I don’t have to worry about that because I can take those calls wherever I am, even when I am out of the office.”
Another important benefit, not obvious when the company first rolled out its RingCentral solution, is added support of its HIPAA compliance initiatives. “Some of our phone messages involve personal health information,” explains Olson. “When you handwrite those details, you create some HIPAA exposure because they need to be handled and destroyed in specific ways. Connecting callers directly to the right people eliminates a lot of these issues—and that lessens our exposure to HIPAA non-compliance.”
“We’re also enjoying peace of mind now because we know RingCentral has these other services integrated into the same solution—like the ability to hold video conferences and even webinars. This will help us communicate more easily and often with our other offices, without having to get on a plane and fly out there. That’s going to save us a lot of money.”
“Rolling out these other RingCentral capabilities will also be great for getting all three of our locations on the same page every day and making us feel like more of a team rather than three separate operations.”