Healthcare

CHU UCL Namur

Automated telephone reception for 3 hospital sites and over 600,000 consultations per year

Largest employer in the province of Namur, a leading university hospital

The project

With its three sites (Sainte-Elisabeth in Namur, Mont-Godinne and Notre-Dame in Dinant), CHU UCL Namur offers a capacity of over 800 beds and has nearly 500 doctors. Each year, more than 600,000 consultations and 60,000 hospitalizations are carried out. To efficiently meet its patients' needs, CHU UCL Namur has implemented an Automated Attendant VoiceBot system for several years, providing smooth and rapid call management to ensure quality reception and continuous service.

Interview with Alexis Gysels, Administrative and Financial Director

Contexte

Context prior to implementation

Interviews with the 3 site administration managers

3 sites sharing the same secure internet connection

3 different telephone centers

Over 50,000 calls per month

86 services managed by Vocabase across the 3 sites

Over 800 people (doctors and staff members)

Direct numbers to certain services (sometimes in large numbers and therefore rarely used)

Sometimes a DTMF IVR but complex and too long

Caller behaviors on the IVR leading to misdirected transfers

Very long waiting times

Telephone reception automation

Automatically answer, greet, qualify, respond and distribute phone calls across the CHU's 3 sites.

Objectives

Free up time for administrative staff

Higher quality reception

Reduced waiting times for patients

Reduce the number of manually handled calls

Reduce misdirected calls

Project implementation

Automated attendant voicebot integrated across the CHU's 3 sites, handling reception, qualification and distribution of calls to 86 services and over 800 people.

Business users

Administrative and financial management

Patient administration managers

Operational managers and telephone reception staff

Provision of lists of services, people and call reasons

Technical experts

ICT CHU UCL Namur (Firewall)

Telecom (Call redirection via IP telephony)

Firewall opening and PABX call redirection to our systems

Vidéos

Production deployment and operations

Amélioration continue

Continuous improvement

Access to a configuration interface

Monitoring of statistics and listening to calls for optimization

System evolution carried out by hospital staff

Quick adaptation to changes (arrivals and departures of doctors)

Easy configuration of the entire Voicebot behavior

Interviews with local managers by topic

Results

75%

Calls handled automatically

-50%

Reception time reduction

Services covered

Staff reassignment

Freed-up staff reassigned to higher value-added tasks and better physical reception.

Multi-site integration

Solution deployed across all 3 sites of the CHU (Sainte-Elisabeth, Mont-Godinne, Notre-Dame) with unified management of 86 services.

Benefits

For the hospital

Better visibility on traffic and the nature of that traffic

Automatic handling of ¾ of calls (approximately 75%)

50% reduction in time spent on telephone reception by dedicated staff, enabling better physical reception (Example: from 2 to 1 person at the Sainte-Elisabeth site)

For staff

Frees up time for reception staff to better handle more sensitive calls and more availability for physical reception (Front desk staff)

The reduced workload on telephone reception enabled internal mobility requested by employees (For example at the Godinne site, 2 people were able to leave reception to join the consultations team)

For patients and their doctors

All calls handled, automatic and fast processing

For doctors calling the CHU, only need to use the general number to access different services

Reduced waiting times. For example, the Sainte-Elisabeth site had 2 waiting times, at the general number level and at the service level; with Vocabase the first waiting time disappeared