Netcall’s project team came on-site for the go-live day, with team members at both the Shoreham and Brighton sites. After extensive training and testing, the staff were very engaged and excited. The Trust was most concerned about Brighton, as staff there faced the biggest change moving from their existing solution to Netcall’s.
Day one: The Liberty Converse contact centre system was switched on. The transformation exceeded all expectations. From being the biggest concern, the Brighton site saw immediate and dramatic improvements
The intelligent call routing and self-service options deflect approximately 36% of calls away from the booking centre, freeing agents to focus on patients who need assistance with complex needs.
Staff experience is equally transformative. Monday mornings are traditionally a stressful time with the most calls to handle. For Sussex, a typical Monday sees 1,500+ calls and this is now easily manageable for the team. Staff appreciate the system’s ease of use, the ability to see who’s online in real-time and the capacity to quickly mobilise additional agents when they are needed.
For patients, this means consistently short wait times and swift resolutions. The 200 appointments now rebooked or cancelled daily through self-service represent 200 fewer calls into the contact centre each day – but more importantly, 200 patients who’ve managed their care on their own terms, at a time convenient to them, without waiting on hold.
Sussex utilised Liberty Converse’s AI Assistant, which they call “AVA”. Using the system’s natural language capabilities, AVA streamlines call routing by understanding what the patient is asking for in their own words. AVA can provide the answer to their query or offer information to enable people to self-serve.
Using AVA and their new capabilities in Liberty Converse, the Trust worked extensively to develop intelligent call streams to deflect unnecessary calls and route patients to the right service without tying up valuable booking centre capacity.
The Trust serves a diverse population and local GPs had regularly requested better language support for patients, but traditional translation services were prohibitively expensive and presented clinical risks.
Now, they are implementing Liberty Converse’s multi-language AI chatbot, tested with native speakers of Polish, Arabic, Ukrainian, French and Spanish. Their testers were impressed with each language translation, especially noting that the Arabic translation, which can be difficult to translate, was perfect.
The Trust has embraced Patient Hub’s Questionnaires. Patient questionnaires, which would have taken weeks to get built, can be prepared by the Trust’s own staff in a matter of minutes. Clinical teams can now view and approve changes swiftly, enabling immediate adjustments.
They can now attach information leaflets to appointments to explain details about procedures and reminders about what to do prior their appointment. This is preventing many patients calling the Trust, as they can find answers to many of their questions from the information sent.
They have also begun to send DNA questionnaires to understand the reasons that patients don’t attend appointments, to continually drive improvement.
The Trust’s contract with their incumbent SMS reminder service lapsed before Patient Hub was online, creating a six-week period where no text reminders were sent DNA rates shot up from 8% to 13% during that period.
When Patient Hub launched, with almost all services going live simultaneously, the rate fell immediately to 5%. Now, after many months using and perfecting their processes, Sussex’s DNA rate hovers at around 4% for all the services using Patient Hub.
The Trust validates their patients on a waiting list with weekly validation processes which are sent to around 4,000 patients.
These validations achieve an impressive 86% digital response rate, with a further 5-6% of patients responding after receiving postal letters. Approximately 14% of patients remain non-digital users, preferring traditional communication methods.
Now, with more capacity in the booking centre, the Trust can efficiently communicate with all patients in the way they prefer.
Our Waiting List Validation solution automates digital patient contact to check who still needs care.
Since Sussex began using the solution, 12% of patients they contacted discharged themselves from the waiting list. By removing these patients from the waiting lists, the Trust’s clinical teams can focus their time and resources on patients who still need to be seen.
All these changes have resulted in significant cost reductions in patient communications for the Trust:
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Monthly text messaging costs reduced by 45% from £33,000 to £18,000 from integrating Patient Hub with the NHS App. Further reductions are expected as more communications move to the NHS App.
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While the costs drop, the Trust are continually moving more departments into the system, so it is processing and handling more, month on month. This makes it difficult to measure the savings, as more questionnaires are sent and more departments are added for Waiting List Validation.
They’re achieving more validation and more questionnaires. And still seeing decreasing costs.