Valley Medical Center Case Study

The Organization 

Located in Renton, Washington, Valley Medical Center (VMC) serves over 600,000 residents offering medical, surgical and 24-hour emergency care as a Level III Trauma Center.  In addition to the hospital, the Medical Center operates a network of more than two dozen primary care, urgent care and specialty clinics throughout Southeast King County. 

Motivation for Change 

Every initiative at Valley Medical Center is designed to put patients first, which requires constant assessment of the effectiveness of the center’s procedures. Accomplishing this mission is what prompted Valley Medical Center to seek out new technologies that would help elevate the patient experience. They recognized that their outdated technology perpetuated fragmented processes across siloed departments. This resulted in slowing the pace of patient interactions and impacting the overall patient experience. In addition, a lack of technology integration created reporting challenges across the organization and limited visibility into their outbound dialing campaigns. Other capabilities that Valley Medical Center lacked included complex outbound dialing, screen and call recordings (to help drive quality and patient communication) and unified reporting.  Another catalyst for undertaking a technology upgrade was The Healthcare Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009, which provided $30 billion to stimulate the adoption and meaningful use of electronic health records and related infrastructure. 

Desired Solution 

Valley Medical Center based their criteria for new patient communication technology on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Triple Aim: decrease healthcare costs, improve population health and enhance care for the individual. Of utmost importance to Valley Medical Center was the ability of their communication technology to integrate with their healthcare record software, Epic, through desktop integration and automation for patients calling to make, cancel and confirm appointments. Specific to patient communications, Valley Medical Center wanted to better connect with today’s patients by expanding beyond voice technology. They also wanted to retire legacy systems and consolidate under one vendor. 

Why Alvaria 

The heart of the enterprise-wide health record system at Valley Medical Center is Epic. Valley Medical Center selected Alvaria as the communication tool that could most help enhance the patient care experience due to Alvaria’s integration with Epic. This technology integration puts Valley Medical Center at the leading edge of utilizing patient record management to personalize and improve the overall patient experience. 

The Results 

Since deploying the full suite of Patient Engagement Solutions, Valley Medical Center has seen many positive patient impacts. The goal for the Alvaria integration with Epic was to optimize call handling, reduce table time loss and update Epic dynamically. Today, screen pops connect Alvaria’s interaction management technology with Epic’ s Hyperspace client upon the arrival of an incoming interaction, whether it be a call, email, text or other channel. Pulling up a patient record prior to a conversation saves the patient time and gives agents a substantial head start on Epic-based workflows. 

Other department-specific benefits include: 

In the Emergency Department, the patient follow up averages rose from >5% to 100%. The Patient Financial Services department now uses new self-service tools to prompt patients to enter the guarantor number on their bill. It then screen pops the patients’ account in Epic to the agent. And agents have omnichannel capabilities to text or email patients further information. The Patient Resource Center, the call center for appointments across the network, will establish an interface connection between Alvaria and Epic scheduling module to achieve their goal of enabling patient self-service through the IVR. Patients will receive a consistent experience across all clinics. The Radiology department has seen such improvements as well as an improved delivery of prep instructions to patients with upcoming procedures due to the omni-channel capabilities. 

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