How the Channel are Solving Challenges in Healthcare in the Age of COVID-19
“The entire healthcare sector is clearly facing challenges the scale and nature of which have never been seen before”, says Simon Whatley, Director of Sales Operations at Tollring. “This means that now, more than ever, the channel has a role to play in making it easy and affordable to roll out solutions that make resource management and remote care not only possible, but efficient, and continue to deliver a consistent level of service.”
How is the Reseller Channel Helping?
Communications systems are being put to the test, ranging from mass communications from GPs about process changes, to individual notifications about hospital appointments, or peaks in inbound calls across all areas of the healthcare industry, from NHS 111, to GPs, to district nursing teams, and all down to the healthcare supply chain.
“Tollring in partnership with Metier Integration services has attempted to ease some of this pain by delivering a COVID-19 update to CallConnect GP (formally Patient Connect), a tool for managing phone calls. Just last week, our team was working with a GP surgery installing CallConnect GP at a five-site, 55,000 patient practise.”
The software has moved from being a useful tool to being essential in helping GPs move towards 100% triage and deal with more calls from concerned patients with possibly fewer staff.
Due to changing advice to not contact NHS 111 and lack of advice, patients are calling back to the GP practices. The software helps to speed up call handling by reception staff since it captures new numbers and avoids the need to check numbers. It tags all associated household numbers to anyone with a coronavirus concern, as well as highlights the vulnerable and at-risk patients. Click to dial is another valued time saving capability.
What are the Key Trends Affecting Demand for Services?
“Practices are looking to have GPs and/or receptionists to be able to work remotely, This creates opportunities for resellers from a telephony viewpoint, but it can also be augmented with the ability to have services like CallConnect GP on their laptops or home computer. There is also a need to take data from multiple clinical systems to allow shared answering facilities between surgeries perhaps in a Primary Care Network who are logged into several clinical systems.”
Call Recording is also becoming more of a must have feature as telephone consultations increase and GPs need to prove “who said what” and protect the practice from complaints. It can also be used for staff training.
“Ultimately, the COVID-19 emergency has accelerated GP practices’ need to work smarter and introduce remote and home working. It has also highlighted the need for clinical system integration and click to dial features.”
As seen in Comms Business