Upgrading the Customer Experience at VA Health Connect

The Challenge: Keep Pace with Complex Information Flows

Facing 45 million calls per year and five touchpoints per veteran, CCC was stretched to the limits of their legacy telephony technology and call-handling processes. A lack of standardization, the large call volume, and the need for data analytic capabilities led to inconsistencies in the veteran experience. There were also limited opportunities for first-contact resolution and virtual appointments.

The Solution: Modernize and Upgrade a Critical System

To help VA modernize CCC, Booz Allen helped design and implement an enterprise CRM solution powered by Salesforce Health Cloud. Known as VA Health Connect, this robust solution integrates seamlessly with VA’s Cisco telephony architecture to provide expanded omni-channel services.

By employing standardized processes, personnel training, and access to customer service data for assessments, the use of this singular new tool improved outcomes for patients, caregivers, and other VA Health Connect customers. VA Health Connect began with the deployment of a clinical triage service, then quickly expanded to include touchpoints around virtual care visits, pharmacy options, scheduling, and other services.

The Impact: Better Visibility and Responsiveness—and Better Patient Care

Today, VA Health Connect offers enhanced capabilities such as enabling CCC staff access to medical and other patient data through a national operational view. Using this unified interface and enhanced user experience, staff members can capture, document, and route calls and cases to improve the efficiency of tracking, reporting, and workload- and performance-data assessments to expedite patient outcomes.

Through the new solution, staff members have a 360-degree view of patients as the CRM functionality pulls data from more than 10 systems into one interface. This provides better visibility into patient-interaction histories and other information. In addition, the number of applications that require navigation from staff members over set time periods has dropped from as many as 45 to just one. VA Health Connect’s full integration with Cisco enables data collection about intake requests, routed cases, transfers to nurse triage, and more, in a single system.

Since its launch, VA Health Connect has enabled staff to triage more than 50,000 veterans while providing real-time interactive data and improving patient care plans and overall outcomes. What’s more, the system runs in a unified environment that all Clinical Contact Centers share nationally, aggregating enterprise metrics for all centers, while providing unique reports for localized provider networks. The system may even help close healthcare’s digital divide by enabling traveling or remotely located patients to get the same services and outcomes just by calling their home VA medical facility.

Looking ahead, Salesforce Health Cloud’s compliance and product roadmap for Health Level Seven and Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources will greatly increase readiness to support future requirements and enhancements to industry standards.