How NICE Interaction Analytics drives deeper patient insights

Across the healthcare industry, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for robust insights into patients and their sentiments. With patients now expecting personalized and empathetic care and adopting telehealth in greater numbers, a growing number of healthcare organizations are recognizing the benefits of interaction analytics to improve processes and outcomes.

Solutions such as NICE Interaction Analytics allow healthcare organizations to drive operational efficiency by uncovering trends and root causes for improved handle times, process improvements—both for internal needs as well as government-required auditing processes. By mapping patient sentiment, organizations can measure and report on patient satisfaction more effectively, which helps them understand patient needs and improve the quality of care. NICE Interaction Analytics can also connect various health issues with social factors, enabling organizations to proactively improve services and patient outcomes. As a result, organizations like IC24, a UK not-for-profit social enterprise providing National Health Service (NHS) virtual and in-person urgent care, are making significant improvements to operational efficiency and patient care.

How IC24 powered better patient outcomes with NICE Interaction Analytics

As a critical provider of care for NHS patients in the UK, IC24 connects with millions of patients every year. The organization historically used manual auditing processes to review and analyze interactions from across their 24/7 operation, capturing less than 2% of patient encounters for evaluation. This left IC24 with a narrow view of the patient experience.

In addition, the time required to perform these audits manually consumed a lot of time and resources. Manual interaction auditing processes are a heavy lift in terms of time and brain power. Just as quality teams analyze processes in other industries, the NHS requires healthcare organizations to verify compliance with regulations and standards, assess risk management practices to ensure that risks are identified, mitigated, and managed effectively, and identify opportunities for continuous improvement. With virtual care specifically, audits include assessing the effectiveness of telehealth service as well as evaluating how well clinicians engage with patients and manage their care remotely.

But when audits are performed manually, healthcare organizations must rely on a sample of interactions with patients. This prevents a deep and wide analysis of patterns occurring across the organization, leaving valuable insights into patient satisfaction and needs untapped. For example, patterns around IVR usage (and redundancies), seasonal patient concerns and overall sentiment are tough to spot with such a small selection of data.

IC24 turned to NICE Interaction Analytics when increased demand and remote work during the pandemic turned robust patient insights from a nice-to-have to an imperative.

Results: Improvements to care and operations

After implementing NICE Interaction Analytics, IC24 began automating components of its internal customer sentiment mapping and more than 70% of its NHS-required auditing processes, for a 20% reduction in the auditing timeline. By being able to analyze 100% of interactions, IC24 can now access deep patient insights and measure and report on all patients’ satisfaction through sentiment analysis.

IC24 was also able to use the solution to streamline processes, including identifying redundancies in the previous IVR set up. Eliminating these reduced IVR message duration by 27% and overall average handle time (AHT) by 16 seconds, among other improvements in efficiency.

And perhaps most importantly, information gleaned from NICE Interaction Analytics is allowing IC24 to improve patient outcomes. The organization can connect various health issues (from Strep A to COVID-19 blood clots) with social factors, like the cost-of-living crisis and public transportation shutdowns. With this knowledge as well as sentiment-driven insights in hand, IC24 is better able to understand patient needs, improve its services and achieve better patient outcomes.

IC24 started out leveraging NICE Interaction Analytics as a response to the increase in remote work and virtual care fueled by COVID-19, but the organization continues to reap the benefits long after the end of the pandemic. Both within the healthcare space and in other industries, the AI-powered solution drives outcomes—whether patient- or business-related—with deep insights into trends and root causes for improved handle times, reduced repeat contacts and process improvements.

Learn more about how IC24 realized significant improvements to operational efficiency and patient care using NICE Interaction Analytics.