automated SMS messages sent to patients every day with RingCentral's SMS API
1,200+
digital faxes processed every day through the RingCentral Fax API
$150K
saved each year by consolidating services with RingCentral
Aside from the added efficiencies and cost savings, integrating RingCentral’s APIs into our care management system means we’re able to provide a better experience for our patients. And that’s our most important metric.
Nicholas Black
Vice President of Finance
One of the largest independent specialty pharmacies in the US
For people suffering from a serious illness—respiratory condition, endocrine disorder, compromised immune system—it is vitally important that these patients receive the right prescriptions, in a timely manner, and that they have support administering their medication. Due to the complex nature of fulfilling such prescriptions, doctors and health plans often choose to work with specialty pharmacies. One of the largest, and most trusted, is Senderra RX.
Founded in 2010, Senderra has quickly become the go-to specialty pharmacy for thousands of physicians’ practices and hospitals across the United States. The company has won numerous awards for customer service—including the national #1 ranking by prescribers in the Zitter Health Insights Survey.
A major reason for Senderra’s success has been the company’s innovative use of technology to improve outcomes for both its healthcare partners and their patients. With its proprietary Patient Care Management System, CarePath, Senderra has built a groundbreaking portal that helps providers cut through the red tape of prescribing costly specialty medications—while also helping to educate patients on their illness and how to properly administer their medication.
Always looking for ways to further improve its workflows—and the customer experience—Senderra turned to RingCentral’s API platform to improve several types of communications through its CarePath system.
A disjointed communications infrastructure led to inefficiencies
“Nicholas Black, Senderra’s Vice President of Finance, explains that the company’s communication services were spread across several vendors and disconnected platforms. “We had an on-prem PBX for our phone service, a separate platform for SMS messaging, and another vendor managing our fax server.”
Nancy Crowell, Senior Vice President of Operations, adds that the inefficiencies this disjointed infrastructure created became increasingly problematic as Senderra’s business grew rapidly in recent years.
“We’re processing about 1,200 faxes every day from doctors who still prefer to send in their prescriptions that way,” she says. “With our old system, that meant manually pulling a fax off the machine, parsing it if it covered more than one patient, and then scanning and uploading the pages into our CarePath system.”
Enhancing patient and provider communications with RingCentral APIs
With RingCentral, Nicholas notes, Senderra found a unified communications solution—and, most important, an open API platform—that allowed the company to automate many of its manual workflows.
“RingCentral’s Fax API is incredibly useful,” he says. “Every faxed prescription comes straight into the RingCentral system, where we can digitally parse documents, tag them with patient IDs, and automatically pull them into our CarePath platform. That’s 1,200 fewer paper faxes a day we’re dealing with. No more waiting at a fax machine. No more manual scanning and uploading. It’s saving our teams enormous amounts of time.”
In fact, by integrating the RingCentral SMS API into the CarePath platform, Senderra is creating new ways of connecting with patients and keeping them up to date on the status of their medications.
“If the CarePath system indicates it’s time for a refill, that now triggers an automated SMS text message to let the patient know,” Nicholas explains. “We’ve built more than a dozen triggers like this, which means we’re providing our patients with more timely information and, ultimately, better service. Plus, given that we’re sending 10,000 of these SMS messages a day, that’s also saving our team tremendous time on manual follow-ups.”
Having RingCentral’s SMS texts sent through CarePath is invaluable when medication is scheduled for delivery, but no one is home. A lot of our medications need to stay refrigerated, so sending out those timely updates can help patients make sure someone will be there to retrieve the package quickly.
Nancy Crowell
Senior Vice President of Operations
Improving internal operations with RingCentral’s unified communications
In addition to the operational improvements RingCentral’s APIs have created for Senderra’s healthcare partners and patients, the company’s employees are also discovering added efficiencies and improved workflows with the unified RingEX (Message, Video, Phone) platform on their desktops, laptops, and cell phones.
“We’re using the RingCentral softphone solution to run our entire, 100-agent call center department,” says Susan McCallum, Senderra’s Director of IT. “That operation is massive. Every month, our agents handle 135,000 inbound calls and make 40,000 calls to patients. But RingCentral is so intuitive and lets us set up call queues and move people between them so easily, we’re no longer having any issues handling that enormous call volume.”
As Nancy adds, RingCentral has given the operations managers more visibility into their call center operations than they’ve ever had. “With RingCentral’s Live Reports, our managers can monitor everything: real-time call volume, how many calls each agent is taking per day, and whether or not we’re hitting our target to answer calls in under 30 seconds. If we start missing some of our metrics, we can investigate to see where we need to beef up our efforts.”
And, as Nicholas points out, Senderra’s staff used both RingCentral Team Messaging and RingCentral Video to stay connected and productive throughout the COVID lockdowns. “The RingCentral unified app gives us multiple ways to communicate with our coworkers,” he says.
“If I have a quick question that doesn’t warrant the full interruption of a phone call, I’ll use the Team Messaging tool. If I want a face-to-face chat, I’ll set up a RingCentral Video. Before COVID, we didn’t have much of a remote-work culture at Senderra. But thanks in large part to RingCentral, the transition was easy—and we were able to continue serving patients immediately.”
RingCentral Video is such a flexible tool that it’s helping our internal operations in a lot of ways. We use it for team status updates, one-on-one chats, company-wide meetings. We even connected the holiday parties we had in our Dallas headquarters and our Flint, Michigan office. We set up RingCentral Video on big monitors in each office, so we could all celebrate as one company.
Susan McCallum
Director of IT
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