As 2020 and 2021 fade further into the distance and the phrase ‘post-pandemic’ grows in popularity, it’s worth checking the rear-view memory for what mustn’t yet be left behind.
When the world needed them most, healthcare workers extended their reach from doctor’s practices and hospitals to desktops and smartphones.
Today, 93% of healthcare contact centers know meetings are better with video. And long after lockdowns, we’re still seeing our essential workers take on digital approaches to caring.
Yet healthcare professionals are not immune from digital threats.
Consider:
- A call dropping out may inconvenience you when on the phone with your friends, but it can be the difference between a patient hearing important treatment advice, or not.
- Your partner walking into the frame on a WFH Video Call may make for an office joke, but background noise on a patient call leads to muddled messages and increased anxiety in an important moment.
Healthcare professionals deserve tech that enhances, not impedes vital interactions. After all, when tech issues arise, they threaten the very reputation they rely on.
That’s why we’ve not only identified the key trends that detail the challenges healthcare contact centers are facing, but we have solutions for them.
Here’s what we know to be true:
Performance is key to the very business and vision of a healthcare service: high performance means a high level of care.
The Research: Alongside voice and video quality, contact center performance management was identified as the top priority in a 2022 Metrigy study that surveyed UC management feature priorities.
You’ll know when technology underperforms or goes down; there are significant negative impacts on patient-clinician care, reputation, and productivity.
The Solution: Virsae’s AI-powered platform makes it simple to manage voice, video, and network performance centrally. Empowering IT to see and fix issues before they impact patient calls.
Reactive and proactive approaches to troubleshooting tech issues are needed.
The Research: 70% of participants surveyed valued alerts that warn of existing problems above all other performance management tools. Identifying potential issues, on the other hand, was a close second.
The Solution: Virsae delivers comprehensive service options, meaning proactive and reactive responses have positive outcomes. With VSM, Artificial Intelligence works to alert IT to existing problems but also identify potential security issues.
We use machine learning to process more than 12 billion data points every month, which helps IT teams see exactly where to invest in their communications network to keep systems operating at peak performance.
Threat identification and mitigation are seen as extremely important, but the majority do not have a comprehensive strategy in place.
The Research: It is no longer optional to include remote worker locations within workplace security policies. Though toll fraud prevention is highly important and threat identification and mitigation is the main use case for security management platforms, only 38% of companies report having a strategy in place.
The Solution: Centralized management platforms can mitigate the increase in threats from malicious robocalls and attacks. Virsae’s real-time diagnostic AI engine tracks fraudulent practices and alerts you to vulnerabilities before they become a problem. Wherever your people are working from.
Sound and video quality in meetings are of increasing importance.
The Research: Though patient satisfaction is high in cases where video consultations are used, at least 20% of respondents experience technical issues according to 2019 data. This pre-pandemic data does not account for the spike in video and audio software use that accompanied lockdowns and the still-increasing usage in the healthcare industry. In general, there is a lack of network visibility and management in remote worker environments.
The Solution: So IT teams can maintain the ability to ensure adequate network performance and, ultimately, support seamless patient-clinician communications, Virsae provides real-time network and room analytics to diagnose and resolve quality issues accurately.
Contact centers are using multiple meeting apps.
The Research: Healthcare is a field of flexibility. In 2022, 64.5% of healthcare facilities are using multiple meeting applications, with Zoom and Microsoft Teams, unsurprisingly, as the most popular. A significant portion, however, use other video platforms such as Google Meet and Cisco Webex Meetings.
The Solution: Virsae’s platform agnostic analytics provide unrivaled insights across hybrid workspaces. This always-on management platform monitors full-stack, end-to-end without limitations, ensuring meetings apps work as the communication tools they were designed to be.
Contact centers predominately use headsets and prioritize employing quality tech hardware.
The Research: The overwhelming majority of healthcare professionals prefer headsets to their handheld alternatives. Furthermore, employers largely choose to equip employees with high-quality endpoints. The reality, though is that quality hardware not only necessitates great care but also does not address all potential failure points in a contact center environment.
The Solution: Just as quality hardware is an investment, so too is Virsae’s platform. Employing Virsae’s technology-agnostic AI will ensure that tech issues are correctly identified and dealt with promptly. Additionally, VSM has adopted the World Health Organization (WHO) standards for healthy audio levels and provides accessible, meaningful insight into hearing health implications for employees and employers, reducing the likelihood of permanent damage.
Learn more about Jabra for Virsae.
Since the pandemic, the workload and work-related risks for healthcare professionals have only increased. As they continue to roll up their sleeves and adapt practices for a post-pandemic world, so too do we need to support them with work environments that are safe and functional.
At Virsae, we are committed to seeing organizations, and their IT Teams deploy platforms that centralize the management of voice, video and network performance across the workforce, no matter the location. In this way, we ensure security and performance protocols are in place to aid clinicians in their work.
In the end, patients don’t want to see the industry having to sacrifice the care of healthcare. And neither do we.
Our research is sourced from Metrigy