Ascension continuously improving digital access to care

Advanced Tools Elevate The Consumer Experience

The pandemic accelerated many trends in consumer behavior and heightened consumers’ expectations, expediting the need for a seamless digital experience that enables our consumers to find, receive, manage and pay for their care. Improving access to care is a key priority for Ascension, and significant progress has been made over the past year to improve performance across all digital access points.

Appointment Scheduling Experience

Shifting Ascension Medical Group primary care physician (PCP) scheduling to the Ascension Contact Center (ACC) is a key first step in expanding our access to care.

The ACC is a centralized contact center with dedicated, mostly virtual teams that engage consumers through high-quality interactions, delivering convenience and care, while simultaneously allowing medical office staff to focus on their patients instead of answering scheduling-related phone calls.

The ACC now handles scheduling for 97% of AMG PCP practices, delivering a frictionless welcoming “front door” to our care offerings. Clinics supported by these teams have seen an increase in appointments per doctor (78% provider utilization, a sustained 4% to 12% increase over non-ACC-supported providers) and a lower rate of abandoned calls than clinics that schedule their own appointments (only 3% of calls abandoned prior to an associate answering).

Expanding Online Chat

Our focus on chat expansion and optimization is also vital to improving access to care for consumers.

“Consumer experience starts long before someone enters a site of care. It begins with a simple, efficient experience while finding and scheduling the care they need,” said Jalal Shawwa, Vice President, Consumer and Patient Experience, Ascension Contact Center Operations. “Consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with live chat and have begun to expect it as part of their healthcare experience.”

Chat, the small box in the bottom right-hand corner on the Ascension website, enables consumers to “chat with us” from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET, seven days a week, and immediately connect with a member of the ACC team who helps schedule, cancel or rebook appointments, or navigate finding a new doctor, among many other supports such as billing, etc.

“We expanded our chat capabilities to make them even more user-friendly,” said Carol Campbell, Senior Vice President and Chief Experience Officer, Ascension. “Through this channel, we can begin to build a relationship right away as a way to reinforce Ascension’s promise to provide personalized, compassionate care across the healthcare journey.”

Chat is currently available to consumers in the Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland and Texas ministries, and it is anticipated to be available in most markets by the end of the year.

ENHANCING OUR ASCENSION.ORG WEBSITE

Offering a welcoming and easy-to-use website is key to providing better access for our consumers. Recent demographic data shows that 42% of those accessing the ascension.org website are from poor and vulnerable communities, as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index. This data highlights the importance of our collective efforts to ensure our digital services are as user-friendly and accessible as possible, especially for those who are poorest and most vulnerable.

Over the past year, Ascension has implemented several improvements to ascension.org, including search engine optimization enhancements to better surface Ascension services in search engine results and improve provider data quality, provider location and appointment availability filters when searching for care providers. Additionally, we started the journey to enhance hospital pages (e.g., Dell Children’s Medical Center in Texas) to better market the services we offer.

We will also be implementing several enhancements to help consumers more easily search for and schedule care on ascension.org, including a more powerful search bar with more intuitive functionality (such as searching for care by symptom and user-friendly, colloquial terms) and a simplified appointment scheduling experience.

“These changes represent just the beginning of the efforts underway as we improve digital access to care across the entire continuum,” said Raj Mohan, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, Ascension. “We know digital often sets one of the first impressions, and we are continuing to enhance many other key aspects of how our patients access care when, where and how they need it.”