CONTENT GURU

Overview
Serving over 9 million people, and with up to 32,000 urgent calls a week, the NHS 11 London service faces huge and often unpredictable peaks in patient contact. It is therefore critical that the service the ability to scale to meet increased demand automatically.

The storm team assisted NHS 111 London in the development of a Patient Relationship Management (PRM) solution, securely integrating distinct medical and care information systems in a single centralised digital location to automatically decide how best to route interactions. Routing to the most appropriate contact has led to significant improvements in patient experience.

The real-time and historical reporting capabilities of storm allow London’s NHS 111 team to easily identify developing epidemics, as well as identifying the areas of the capital that are most affected.

The Challenge
NHS 111 London uses five call-handling providers and nine data providers. Hundreds of pieces of information are rapidly fed between sources during interactions in order to best support patients.Patients were previously routed to any available call handler – regardless of requirements or recent interactions – forcing them to repeat details, symptoms, and developments. This led to low first contact resolution and lengthy average handle times. Additionally, the team did not have real-time reporting, which made it difficult to determine and mitigate unusual spikes in symptoms or locations.

The Solution
Content Guru worked with NHS 111 London to support the development of the PRM solution which, from the first discussion, took only 2 months to deploy.

Patients are now rapidly directed to the most appropriate healthcare professional first-time, based on their medical records. Clinical Advisors are automatically fed relevant patient information upon answering a call, allowing care to be individually tailored and reducing waiting times drastically. The PRM solution also identifies repeat callers, routing them to the same NHS 111 provider they had previously spoken to. Repeat callers with developing or long-term health conditions are automatically assigned a high-priority status, and relevant information is supplied to the answering Health Advisors.

NHS 111 London has gained a complete view of healthcare across the capital through storm’s real-time and historical reporting capabilities. The PRM solution also uses load balancing, whereby calls are strategically distributed to each provider equally to ensure efficient routing and lower chances of call failure.