Today's healthcare market continues to face difficult challenges including escalating medical costs, changing healthcare standards, increasingly demanding government mandates, and growing competition. The desire to provide improved health and wellness services to patients is weighed against increasing medical and operational costs—creating an industry-wide dilemma. Additionally, with a much more knowledgeable customer base demanding better products and services, the ability to remain profitable is becoming extremely difficult. The key to improving service to patients and providers, while also reducing costs, is greater efficiency. Automated speech self-service applications on Microsoft® Speech Server (MSS) can help generate that efficiency.
Imagine a world where patients can authorize the release of medical records, or doctors can renew prescriptions, all by telephone through a secure voice verification system, without the help of an operator.
Healthcare plans, providers including managed care facilities, medical centers, hospitals, as well as pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, can reduce costs and offer enhanced privacy with self-service speech applications. Healthcare providers can now harness the power of speech recognition and telephone self-service to empower employees and patients to quickly obtain routine information, so valuable staff members are available to resolve more complex issues.
Industry experts cite the healthcare industry as being a major growth area for speech-enabled self-service. Patients and providers are able to get information quickly, and properly designed applications ensure privacy protection for confidential information.
The following table lists some of the numerous self-service applications being used in several different sectors of healthcare.
| Application | Description | Savings/Benefit |
| Patient account and billing inquiry | Verify an account balance, check the date of the last payment, change an address, or make a payment. Customers perform these functions safely and securely at their convenience by just picking up the telephone. | $5 to $25 per call. |
| Request copy of statement | Healthcare customers can get a copy of a statement, or any other standard form. The information can be mailed, faxed, or e-mailed. | $5 to $10 per call. |
| Appointment reminders | Most doctors’ offices and clinics call their patients to confirm appointments—a time consuming task. Do it automatically with an MSS application. | $5 to $10 per call, while removing a heavy load from office staff. |
| Physician or facility locator | Let patients or insured customers know where to find the healthcare provider nearest to them. | $5 to $10 per call. |
| Test results inquiry | Allow physicians to check the results of a test, or multiple tests, while making rounds. An outbound notification system can inform a doctor with critical results. Patients also may call in for test results. | $10 to $20 per call, while increasing security and confidentiality. |
| Drug trial registration and information | Patients participating in clinical drug trial studies can report symptom data quickly by simply using their telephone. | $20 to $25 per call. |
| Bed tracking | Mobile healthcare professionals can easily track the status of any bed in their hospital or managed care facility by simply picking up a telephone. | Increasing the efficiency of a healthcare facility can improve profits by thousands of dollars per month. |
| Account payment | Healthcare providers often write-off small amounts because of the high administrative costs associated with collecting past due accounts. A speech-enabled application can cut costs while still empowering providers to collect overdue balances. | A clinic realized over $500,000 in increased cash flow in the first year from past due accounts. |
| Insurance claim status | The claims process is often long. Allow customers to check the status of their claim with just a telephone call. | An insurance company showed immediate savings of over $20,000 per month. |
| Insurance benefit and coverage verification | Verify benefits or coverage to the insured of a healthcare provider. | $10 to $20 savings per call. |
| Automated attendant | Correctly route inbound telephone calls without the help of an operator. Allow customers to reach a person, leave a message, get directions, or get information at any time seven days a week. | A healthcare insurance company realized savings of over $60,000 per month by automatically transferring callers to the correct agent. |
| General information request | Let your customers get standard information without using the time of a valuable person. | $10 to $15 savings per call. |
| Pharmacy re-orders | Prescription refills are straight-forward to automate. Patients can order prescriptions any time without being put on hold to wait or using the time of a valuable pharmacist. | Increase customer satisfaction by avoiding long hold times. Increase efficiency by freeing people of routine tasks. |
| Pharmacy drug instructions and information | Patients often throw away the standard instructions for their medications. Allow the patient to get that information with a quick and simple telephone call. | $5 to $15 savings per call. |
| Password Reset | Use speech recognition and speaker verification technology to automatically reset passwords that your employees have forgotten. | $20 to $30 per call, while freeing your valuable Help Desk staff of a burdensome task. |
By addressing key business issues, Microsoft Speech Server (MSS) offers a number of benefits to the healthcare industry. MSS-based applications help companies and organizations:
| • | Improve customer satisfaction – MSS enables callers/customers to complete routine transactions when it fits into their busy lifestyles without waiting for an agent or following rigid business hours. Using MSS, healthcare companies can extend their ASP.NET-based Web applications to the world’s 2.2 billion telephones to reach today’s highly mobile customers. |
| • | Maintain privacy and help meet Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements – By coupling MSS applications with the exciting technology of speaker verification, speech self-service can ensure privacy for the often sensitive and confidential information that passes between healthcare companies and their customers. |
| • | Extend services easily – Speech technology allows companies to scale their information and customer service offerings to meet the demands of new markets—or extend existing services to new markets. For example, by deploying speech-enabled applications designed for Canadian French or U.S. Spanish speaking customers, healthcare companies can better address the needs of a variety of customers. |
To better understand how speech self-service applications can help lower costs and improve customer service, join us for a webinar on March 9, 2006. Click here to register.
Author: Randy Henry, Director of Alliances & Partnerships, Gold Systems