The Customer
Tens of thousands of physicians, nurses and patients rely on excelleRx every day. The company's Pharmaceutical Care Support Centers (PCSCs) are staffed by specially-trained pharmacists and pharmacy technicians who serve customers in 48 states with 24/7 medication management services. ExcelleRx employs more than 400 of these skilled "agents" — brought together by a Nortel Virtual Contact Center solution that integrates three locations and a growing number of remote and home workers.
The Challenge
Because the contact center agents who serve excelleRx customers are highly skilled and their medication management services are of critical importance to care givers and their patients, assuring efficient access and high-quality services is paramount. The company focuses on getting calls in queue, monitoring work flow and tracking the availability and performance of their technicians and pharmacists. Being able to locate PCSCs in cities with a sufficient labor pool of pharmacists and to connect them virtually through technology is fundamental to leading-edge service delivery. A mobile workforce of nurses and other caregivers often need to access excelleRx care centers from their cars as well as from patients' homes and at patients' bedsides. "On-the-go nurses don't have time for waiting in long queues to reach a technician or pharmacist," said Joe Filipolli, Senior Vice-President, IT, excelleRx. "They have mobile access to patient data thanks to Xeris®, the excelleRx custom pharmacy software, but we were seeking ways to integrate this data with our contact center and better serve customers and patients with innovative solutions."
The Solution
A Nortel Contact Center and self-service solutions are helping excelleRx serve customers with interactive voice response, speech recognition and multimedia contacts for enhanced medication management and improved operating costs for the company.
To offer enhanced medication management services, excelleRx is migrating to the next-generation suite of Nortel Contact Center solutions and applications. The company receives some 7,500 calls every weekday at its three state-of-the-art call centers — now an integrated virtual contact center with the Nortel Communication Server 1000M in Philadelphia and Nortel Meridian Option 11 systems at remote offices in Tempe and Memphis. A nurse, physician or patient seeking excelleRx pharmacotherapy expertise has increasing options for reaching pharmacy technicians and clinical pharmacists. Interactive voice response (IVR) offers a self-service platform that lets them "press" keys to enter data for patient discharge and prescription refills. Speech-enabled applications are letting them "say" the same information to keep their hands free. New speech applications will also support patient admissions and clinical assessments.
Nortel Call Pilot Unified Messaging is helping excelleRx manage call volume. "When we experience a spike in call volume," explained Steve Lemak, Vice-President, IT, excelleRx, "customized scripting lets us give callers the option to choose voice mail rather than stay in queue. We then use the Nortel CallPilot notification feature to e-mail managers. It works beautifully."
The Benefits
Reaching the right resources more rapidly – With a speech application called Fast Track, nurses who contact the care center can say a patient's name and security ID and then answer such assessment requests as pain, appetite and sleep levels. With this information, skill-based routing will bypass the technician and send the caller to the appropriate pharmacist. "By modifying our Nortel CallPilot menus and offering this option to callers on hold with a technician, uptake for Fast Track has doubled, representing some five percent of encounters a day," said Lemak.
Greater efficiency to reduce costs – Admitting new patients into the excelleRx system — some 70,000 each month — is a lengthy process, taking care center agents from 4-8 minutes to collect patient data. Following admissions, pharmacists input a clinical assessment into the patient database. "Using speech recognition for these processes is complex and requires a wide-open dictionary that accepts 20,000-plus nurses' accents, patient addresses and names of medications. But it's an easier road with the Nortel solution," said Joe Filipolli. "Having a two-way process that required manual data entry become speech-enabled can take five or more seconds off thousands of calls. That allows us to re-deploy agents, improve overall care center efficiency and reduce costs."
Custom integrations – The Nortel Communications Control Toolkit, based on the Microsoft.Net framework, provides a customized screen pop tool that's also a data entry tool for excelleRx. It provides a CTI application that integrates the Xeris® pharmacy data system into agent desktop applications.
The Industry Problem:
As our largest segment of the population gets more elderly, the need for hospice care, medications, health consultations, and treatment is increasing. The leading edge of the baby-boom generation began turning 55 in 2001. The healthcare industry is rated as one of the fastest growing in size, with costs continually growing in North America today and for the next ten years.
Some major medical providers are focusing on new and innovative ways to provide exceptional service to this population through the use of technology.
By 2050, the world will include nearly 1.5 billion people age 65 or older, with 1.2 billion living in less developed countries. This demographic transition will profoundly affect the health and socioeconomic development of all nations. Aging is both a cause and consequence of slowing population growth—even population decline—in an increasing number of countries. Aging is also associated with higher rates of widowhood, expanding percentages of women at older ages, negative population momentum, and important shifts in the labor force.
The World's 15 'Oldest' Countries and the United States
Nearly one-fifth of Japanese and Italians are age 65 or older—and this percentage is increasing. Close behind are 12 other European countries identified in this graphic. The United States, with 12 percent age 65 or older, is relatively "young" by these standards.
Except for Japan, the world's 15 oldest countries are all in Europe.
The U.S. population is relatively "young" by European standards, with less than 13 percent age 65 or older, ranking as the 38th oldest country.
The aging of the baby-boom generation in the United States will push the proportion of older Americans to 20 percent by 2030; it will still be lower than in most Western European countries.
The older share of the population is expected to more than double between 2000 and 2030 in Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. Aging is occurring more slowly in sub-Saharan Africa, where relatively high birth rates are keeping the population "young."
The figure above depicts what demographers refer to as the feminization of aging. Although women make up half of world population, by the end of the next quarter century, they will account for more than half (54 percent) of people ages 60 and older, and 63 percent of very old people (80 and older).
About ExcelleRx:
excelleRx, Inc. is a provider of pharmaceutical care for niche disease markets, providing medication consultation and pharmaceutical distribution services. Combining proprietary technology and clinical experience, excelleRx ensures the appropriate use of medication, and thereby enhances quality of life. Caregivers from healthcare facilities nationwide rely on excelleRx to manage their patients’ pharmacotherapy needs.
About Nortel:
Nortel is a company that delivers communications capabilities that make the promise of Business Made Simple a reality for our customers. Our next-generation technologies, for both service provider and enterprise networks, support multimedia and business-critical applications. Nortel's technologies are designed to help eliminate today's barriers to efficiency, speed and performance by simplifying networks and connecting people to the information they need, when they need it. Nortel does business in more than 150 countries around the world.
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