The Operations Perspective

A freer health care market brings new expectations and demands from its customer base. Whether offering self-diagnostics and information, setting complex appointments or providing test results, customers expect a choice of information delivery channels, integrated communications (eg test results) and rapid follow through to the next step. Processes, staff and systems involved in patient/customer correspondence need it to be sufficiently robust, reliable, flexible and accountable to deliver to this agenda.

Operations leaders in the Healthcare sector understand the challenges of ensuring that operational delivery with good service is balanced by efficient cost management. Allowing customers to choose their communications channel preferences, for example, can also enable significant savings as data entry tasks are performed by customers rather than staff.

Overcoming correspondence challenges means ensuring that the ways you communicate with customers is relevant, timely and via a route they prefer. To do this staffs need the ability to compose, send out and retrieve your customer documentation quickly and efficiently working within tight budgets. But you also need to know how to:

• Reduce manual interventions and handoffs across teams and within processes
• Quantify the true costs and opportunities of print and letter-production
• Maintain a central repository of communications for both efficiency and audit
• Overcome compliance failures and reduce document production timescales.

With Icon UK, all these challenges can be tackled head on.

For many, the way forward has many options: the rationalisation of disparate systems, particularly if the organisation is running more than four solutions trying to achieve the same purpose; replacement of technology that no longer delivers; redefining operational processes for greater efficiency; and responding proactively to new directions with thought leadership and innovative solutions.

Managing these in the face of growing demands for supporting ever larger customer bases, cost reduction and expectations of shorter deliver times is a challenging occupation; Ask Icon UK about how to make it easier!

Challenges

As the health care industry enters new phases of organisational structure and competition, exceptional customer communications and customer service are increasingly vital. The lack of comprehensive management and capture of communications can result in:

• Exposure to litigation through simple errors in patient/customer correspondence
• Uncontrolled cost exposure for “discovery” of communications in the event of litigation
• Potential loss of complete customer interactions’ picture
• Business impact of time to implement regulatory changes
• Competitive impact of time to deploy marketing initiatives

All leading to additional costs, customer dissatisfaction and negative market image…

Against the backdrop of these challenges, Operations leaders in this sector need to an enterprise tool that will tackle these issues whilst under the watchful eye of regulators such as the Care Quality Commission or the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA). This means that Operational Efficiency is not the only concern; reputation and customer confidence at risk if these issues are not dealt with promptly, satisfactorily and systematically.

How Icon Helps

Icon Suite offers Healthcare organisations the opportunity to address all these challenges in one solution platform. Practically every type of document can be flexibly constructed from pre-approved templates, incorporating powerful re-use and multi-lingual features. Structured, Interactive and On-demand output types can be produced and include Proposals and Quotations, Appointment confirmations, Policies, Statements, Customer Self-Service, Correspondence and Third Party Communications, etc. (see ‘Uses’ on Healthcare Overview).

Different modes of patient/customer engagement are supported across all media types. Through deploying this platform, with transformational change and operational services where required, we help organisations change the way they engage with customers. Customers benefit from highly personalised, flexible and positive experiences they are pleased to recommend to others. Icon provides many forms of industrial strength enterprise document solutions.

Icon solutions offer:

1. Process mapping & case flow analysis to identify & quantify issues and propose solutions
2. Appropriate benchmarking so the scale of improvement opportunity is known
3. Plans quickly in place to defines the ROI of a print-and-content rationalisation path
4. Cross- departmental coverage so all users can look in one place for view of customer
5. Business units the confidence of well-vetted, compliant communications
6. One repository provides that everything is in one place and re-use of assets increases

These in turn drive excellent efficiency ratios.

Icon UK can assist in the all areas related to improving customer communications including:

Organisations that engage Icon find they can understand what customer communications are really costing and translate this into a compelling Return on Investment case. By investing in the right solutions they can improve content and policy control, attain better patient outcomes, increase customer loyalty and achieve top-quartile performance in customer communications management. In doing so they develop a robust platform for meeting both strategic objectives [such as rapidly re-branding following restructuring] and tactical delivery [such as large scale personalised messaging on a multi-lingual, multi-channel basis delivered cost-effectively].

Some of the world’s largest and leading service organisations use our technology solutions. Call us to find out how we can help your organisation.