Akixi shows how service providers can create added value for customers in the healthcare sector

Healthcare organizations face a number of challenges when it comes to meeting their accessibility goals, handling high volumes of inbound calls, and managing their workforce efficiently. Off-the-shelf unified communications platforms have enabled these organizations to move away from expensive, inflexible on-premise systems. However, these often do not integrate easily with industry-specific applications or specialized systems from other vendors. In addition, valuable features such as analytics can be difficult to integrate, leaving healthcare organizations without full access to new innovations and the existing functionality they need to operate effectively.

These opportunity gaps and potential performance deficiencies present a huge opportunity for service providers to add value by adding additional functionality, integrations, features and support to popular UC platforms. This creates an attractive new market and offers service providers the opportunity to replace traditional service revenue if they can demonstrate their capabilities and deliver the specializations that healthcare organizations require.

“In healthcare, performance and reporting are heavily focused on compliance,” said Colin Gill, vice president of Cisco Business at Akixi.

“In the UK, primary care needs to achieve certain KPIs to receive and retain a certain level of funding, so being able to measure and respond to KPIs in real time is critical.”

Roles range from triaging initial calls to GP surgeries to telemedicine and chronic condition monitoring. Systems must not only be able to handle high volumes of general calls, such as the 2,500 calls GP surgeries in the UK receive on average each week, but also provide specialist support for individual patients. In addition, many staff need access to patient records, specialist appointment diaries, facility booking and mobile connectivity for staff in the communities they serve.

The ability to meet these extensive and varied requirements gives service providers points of differentiation that enable them to deliver value to healthcare organizations. By leveraging sector-specific knowledge, service providers can create tailored packages that address healthcare organizations’ limited financial resources and enable cost-effective, straightforward implementations that help optimize staff resources. For example, a system that provides insight into patient call volumes, call times, and response trends can help improve call wait times with minimal staff costs.

Likewise, with a package that enables real-time and historical performance monitoring and reporting, the healthcare organization can demonstrate that it is meeting its goals and thus secure additional funding. Service providers can enable healthcare CRM integrations with common systems used in the industry and provide clear insights into current call key performance indicators (KPI) values.

Akixi has been helping service providers target industries such as healthcare for many years with its integration capabilities and recently added CRM integration with the acquisition of Mondago, which is now part of its offering. The new capabilities, further strengthened by Akixi CX Analytics for Microsoft Teams provided by their service provider, have enabled organisations such as Gleadless Medical Centre in Sheffield, UK, which serves around 9,000 patients, to reduce call wait times, improve resource utilisation, enable real-time call tracking and implement strategic call management.