Quality Monitoring Tool

Healthcare providers and other healthcare organizations should be leveraging a quality monitoring tool. What is quality monitoring and analyzing? Many times, operations leaders within any healthcare industry use the quality monitoring process to analyze a system, process, activity, or tool to determine its efficiency and quality. The operations teams will then use the results from that analysis to uncover areas of improvement to performance. A healthy and active quality monitoring system is essential to ensure that resources are well-allocated and that normal business proceedings are happening as they should, without any interruptions based on inefficient or ineffective systems within the organization. 

Authenticx is a quality monitoring software that analyzes customer or patient interactions with contact center agents using conversational data and artificial intelligence (AI). There are several ways that healthcare organizations can use the data revealed by Authenticx, but operations teams, in particular, use Authenticx’s quality monitoring tool for two main reasons:

1. Ensure that risk mitigation and compliance adherence are being kept in the communication between call center agents and patients.
2. Evaluate the overall value and quality of the call center’s relationship with the healthcare organization.

If a partnership with a call center is not saving the healthcare organization money by increasing patient retention, handling patient inquiries effectively, etc., the operations teams could then choose to recommend the end of that partnership in favor of finding a more effective one. Switching call center and hub vendors can also hold its own set of issues, such as training and onboarding.

Quality monitoring is an incredibly difficult, if not impossible, task to do without the correct set of tools. Manually recording quality monitoring data is not scalable and does not automatically update with the inclusion of new information. Healthcare organizations that utilize industry-specific tools (like Authenticx) for a quality monitoring tool can simply review the automatically generated reports daily without the need to input data or perform manual calculations. Authenticx uses artificial intelligence to score patient and agent conversations based on a variety of different factors. It can identify conversations based on topic and human sentiment so that operations departments can view information individually if they’d like to perform a deeper analysis for problem-solving. 

Quality Monitoring In Healthcare

What is quality monitoring in healthcare? In healthcare, quality definition is in determining and measuring processes, outcomes, patient perceptions, and organizational structures or systems. The Institute of Medicine also defines quality in healthcare as “the degree to which the services received increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current healthcare professional knowledge.” Quality monitoring in healthcare is an industry-standard, and in the example of HIPAA compliance, is mandated. It is essential that organizations have quality monitoring tools in healthcare to ensure that both their patients and their businesses are protected. HIPAA violations can be severe, and the consequences harm both patients and healthcare providers.

There are several quality indicators in healthcare that healthcare organizations and operations departments must be aware of. While some are purely related to patient discharge processes, there are also quality indicators for office procedures and quality of care overall. Indicators that Authenticx can help identify are: 

• Effectiveness. Authenticx can determine if patient problems were solved on call or if they were pushed back or exacerbated. 
• Efficiency. Authenticx can determine the rate at which the patient’s issues were resolved or how many concerns are going unresolved as a whole. 
• Patient-centricity. Authenticx can identify and sort conversations based on human sentiment, so the way a patient or caller feels can be searched for directly in the platform, helping operations departments discern if a patient felt that their care was centered on them or not. 
• Safety. Authenticx can help screen for compliance events or violations where patient safety is at risk, or a call center agent is at risk of violating care standards on behalf of the healthcare provider. 
• Timeliness. Authenticx can determine how quickly patient issues are resolved, how many calls an agent is infielding/outfielding/abandoning/redirecting per day, etc. This can help operations managers determine if a call center is a good fit for the healthcare provider.

Quality Measures In Healthcare

If an organization is wondering how to measure quality improvement in healthcare, Authenticx can provide actionable and specific data for nearly every quality indicator when it comes to customer experience and service. Authenticx can also track changes over time, making it simple to tell when improvements have occurred. The importance of quality measures in healthcare cannot be overstated, as the insights gained from quality improvement tools in healthcare can be vital in improving patient retention and quality of care. Quality measures in healthcare need to be identified and monitored to determine how likely it is that a patient is receiving care that will result in a favorable health outcome. 

Quality monitoring tools don’t only provide a jumble of numbers and data; they identify recurring problems and lead providers to solutions. Authenticx can identify places in the customer journey where patients are facing adversity and getting stuck, needing to repeat their problem-solving process from the beginning. Authenticx calls these recurring problem areas, or disruptions in the patient experience, “The Eddy Effect,” and has a built-in dashboard to identify and resolve issues such as these. That feature alone makes it one of the strongest healthcare quality measurement tools on the market today. Authenticx helps healthcare providers solve issues that are measured by quality improvement tools, not just identify them.

Monitoring Quality In Project Management

Authenticx can also be a useful tool when monitoring quality in project management for healthcare call centers. Quality control in project management monitors project outputs, determines compliance with applicable standards, and can identify risk factors, their mitigation, and ways to prevent and eliminate unsatisfactory performance. The importance of project quality management is most evident when done poorly. Many improvements made in business processes can be attributed to project quality management. 

While quality indicators will most likely be determined by any organization’s stakeholders in project management, there are a few typical examples of quality standards in project management. Commonly accepted examples of quality standards in project management are:

• Performance
• Functionality
• Suitability
• Reliability
• Consistency

Authenticx can help healthcare organizations pinpoint all of the above down to the call center agent level and identify if project quality management examples are being followed. Authenticx can be useful in helping healthcare organizations identify if their call centers are using project quality management plan examples of their own. While a healthcare organization is often not directly involved or responsible in the day-to-day management of a call center that they partner with, it is their responsibility to ensure that their patients are being well-treated by the contact center. Using Authenticx to identify how a contact center is performing using the quality standards as a measurement can help a healthcare organization make an informed decision about whether to remain partnered with that specific contact center.

Quality Indicators Examples

Quality indicators in hospitals are an important part of healthcare. While there are different quality indicator standards for different aspects of healthcare, quality indicator examples as a whole might include things like mortality, timeliness of care, rate of re-admissions, patient experience, the safety of care, and others. The quality indicators in nursing are very similar. While Authenticx may not measure the specific statistics of inpatient care, such as re-admissions or mortality rates, it can measure patient sentiment, which is represented in quality indicators under patient experience. Healthcare providers can prove or identify the quality indicator of patient experience based on Authenticx data reporting patient sentiment. 

The AHRQ, or Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, publishes its own recommendations for quality indicators. The AHRQ quality indicators are broken down into four distinct categories to provide universal and accessible quality measures that can be used to indicate performance in healthcare. What are the four quality indicators recommended by the AHRQ?

The four quality indicators from the AHRQ are Prevention Quality Indicators (PQIs), Inpatient Quality Indicators (IQIs), Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs), and Pediatric Quality Indicators (PDIs). While many of these quality indicator scores are calculated with information found on hospital patients’ charts, the Prevention Quality Indicators can also be supplemented with information found in Authenticx, such as access to outpatient care or further healthcare needs in the communities in which they serve.

Monitoring, Measurement, Analysis, And Evaluation Procedure Examples

Quality monitoring tools, like Authenticx, can be used for providers wondering how to monitor product quality. The feedback given by patients and customers is directly related to the products and services provided by a healthcare organization. Quality indicators are used by every healthcare organization in the industry and must usually be compliant with the highest standards of care. One way of measuring quality is by using the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) quality measures. The CMS is responsible for creating health and safety guidelines for hospitals and healthcare facilities all over the United States. A list of CMS quality measures might include patient and family engagement, patient safety, care coordination, population/public health, efficient use of healthcare resources, and clinical process/effectiveness.

Authenticx can measure a patient’s perception based on any of the CMS quality measures, as well as identify any compliance events that may arise while on the phone with a contact center agent. Monitoring, measurement, analysis, and evaluation procedure examples for quality monitoring tools can be found with the customer stories of use cases for Authenticx.

Process Monitoring Examples

Authenticx doesn’t only provide automated call quality monitoring, they can also provide data quality monitoring techniques. Healthcare providers can use Authenticx to make a difference in their businesses based on the specific and actionable data that the platform provides. Productivity monitoring and control is just one aspect of using software to analyze conversations between healthcare patients and a call center. 

Authenticx is made up of several key features, which all play a different role in identifying potential patient issues and the prevalence of the Eddy Effect within a healthcare organization’s processes. Speech Anaylticx is a feature that uses conversational data artificial intelligence to break down what patients are calling about and why. This feature also allows healthcare organizations to listen to individual calls, showcasing process monitoring examples. This feature is huge for improving customer service, customer experience, and operations within healthcare organizations. However, there are multiple departments that can benefit from the insights that Authenticx provides. 

Smart Predict is a feature that uses machine learning to automatically score conversation evaluations and identify how call center agents work. This kind of feedback on how patient and agent conversations are going is key in identifying productivity, call quality, and process. The information gained from this feature allows healthcare providers to effectively score the quality of their call center and determine how to best serve their patients after they’ve been discharged.