Barton Health is a nonprofit health system spanning the California and Nevada border that provides high-quality, compassionate care to Lake Tahoe residents and the area’s visitors. Opened in 1963, Barton offers comprehensive healthcare services through a coordinated network of medical facilities, including a certified Level III Trauma Center. It also has a rural healthcare center that specializes in serving Californians who don’t have regular insurance.
Barton Health is perhaps best known for its orthopedics and it provides orthopedic support to the U.S. ski and snowboard team.
Providing Healthcare Information in Challenging Circumstances
Barton Health is a small, independent, and rural healthcare center. Healthcare is a critical need, but providing it in rural areas is rarely easy. Without a large budget, it’s difficult to serve everyone across an expansive, sparsely populated area. Operating an on-site contact center and finding enough local employees to staff it wasn’t easy.
Lisa Ramsey-Simpson, Director of Operations, oversees the IT Department and Project Management Office and the contact center at Barton Health. She shares that Barton Health decided to level up their contact center operations a few years back. Like many organizations, the COVID-19 pandemic was a major impetus as it spurred Barton to move to a remote work setup for its contact center.
A Firestorm of Issues
Many of the challenges Barton Health has faced are familiar to just about any small- or medium-sized organization. These include budgetary constraints, finding the best talent, and figuring out how to serve their customers with the resources available. However, Barton also faced — and may face again — a less common problem: fire.
“We’re in a high fire zone and we’ve actually had to deal with evacuations,” Ramsey-Simpson explains. When a fire is threatening its premises, a retail business or office might simply tell its employees to stay home and take a day or two off until the fires die down. But you don’t have that luxury when you’re a healthcare provider — you have to help people who are hurt by those fires, both directly and indirectly.
For example, the fires could mean that somebody pregnant can’t reach the healthcare facility where they intended to deliver their baby. That’s a frightening situation, but Barton was able to help.
Working With Cisco in Times of Crisis
While fires were burning around Lake Tahoe, Barton evacuated patients to keep them safe. This was challenging on its own, but Barton also had to continue handling calls from other patients with a variety of questions and issues. Thankfully, they had Cisco.
“It actually helped a lot,” Ramsey-Simpson says. Patients could get a real person on the phone and ask where they can go to have a baby or any other healthcare question. “We could facilitate that conversation with patients … by reconfiguring our contact center system so we could help patients even though our own hospital and facilities were being evacuated.”
Ramsey-Simpson credits Cisco for helping Barton deliver critical support to the community. At the time, Barton Health was using Cisco UCCX and had not migrated to Webex Contact Center yet. Still, this Cisco UCCX was critical to Barton and its agents at that stressful time.
“We had to have technical support [during this period] because it wasn’t the upgraded version that we have now where we have a bit more personal control. We called technical support and we got them to help us reconfigure. We were literally doing that as I was driving down the mountain trying to avoid the fire.
“By the time I got down the mountain, we were taking calls successfully with patients. Even agents at hotel rooms were able to pick up calls and help patients.” Agents who had to evacuate were able to quickly set up and take calls from their new locations, while those outside the fire zone continued to provide service to patients throughout the emergency.
How Webex Helps
A healthcare company trying to guide nervous patients during a wildfire is not the type of challenge many contact centers face. However, the situation demonstrates just how adaptable Cisco UCCX has been and how it can serve organizations in a variety of situations.
After using Cisco UCCX for several years, Ramsey-Simpson and her team decided to shift to Webex Contact Center, Webex Calling, Webex Meetings, Webex Messaging to achieve their remote working objectives. To facilitate this shift, Barton Health worked with Cisco Partner Bucher + Suter. Garrich Theisen, Director of Customer Success at Bucher + Suter, explains the transition:
“At Barton Health, the move from UCCX to Webex Contact Center in the cloud was about more than just upgrading technology! It was about reinforcing their commitment to a patient-first approach. At Bucher + Suter, we worked closely with their team to ensure a seamless transition, implementing automated call routing, reducing call abandonment rates, and improving nurse (agent) efficiency. These enhancements have allowed Barton Health to provide faster, more effective patient care.”
Today, Ramsey-Simpson paints a much less nerve-wracking picture of the everyday life of a Barton contact center agent. “They answer calls. They look at daily briefs. [The briefs have] support information regarding all the service lines they support and any kind of urgent changes. And they collaborate with all our clinical teams, usually via chat.”
In an average month, Barton handles about 25,000 calls for their service lines and hospital outpatient departments.
Advantages of Using Webex Contact Center
Barton’s contact center agents enjoy using Webex Contact Center. Ramsey-Simpson points to two major benefits Barton agents have commented on: real-time feedback and unbiased data. The feedback allows agents to improve their performances quickly and avoid repeating mistakes.
Because Webex Contact Center stores so much data and makes it so accessible, both agents and supervisors can see it for themselves. This way, nobody’s opinions or preconceived ideas get in the way. If a supervisor asks an agent to work on improving a facet of their work, the agent knows the request is an honest and accurate one because the supervisor can point to the data.
Another thing supervisors at Barton’s contact center like is the consulting feature. Ramsey-Simpson explains: “We have a lot of people that speak other languages and the consulting feature allows us to pull in our language access interpreters into the calls when necessary.”
The ease and efficiency of using a single platform is a big advantage for Barton. It’s even helped improve the patient experience. “Before, it was fragmented. Patients would call individual clinics and, if somebody was out, they couldn’t get a hold of anyone right away.” With a consolidated contact center, patients can always get an agent on the line.
Barton Health also continues to work with Bucher + Suter to ensure they continue to provide the important services patients need. Garrich Theisen explains: “As they embark on building a new dual-campus hospital, Bucher + Suter remains their trusted Cisco partner. We are committed to ensuring their Webex Contact Center scales with their growth while continuing to deliver the exceptional patient-centric experience their community expects.”
The Statistics
As data is so important to Barton Health, of course they have the stats to support their enthusiasm for Webex. These include:
- An average handle time of at or below 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
- The call abandonment rate at agent level has dropped from 2.7% to 1.5%
- An average speed of answer at or below 1 minute and 20 seconds.
Ramsey-Simpson has also noticed a significant increase in the number of people calling thanks to Webex expanding Barton’s bandwidth. This shows Barton’s patients always wanted more interaction with the company — something the healthcare center can finally achieve.
“I think Webex Contact Center is key to our success,” Ramsey-Simpson concludes. “We couldn’t have done it without the data and information we get, the real-time feedback, and the ability to configure and change on the fly.”
Contact our team today to learn how Webex can help your organization improve collaboration and customer experience.
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