Intermountain Healthcare is an internationally recognized, nonprofit system with over 25 hospitals with 25 pharmacies, a Medical Group with more than 185 physician clinics, and an affiliated health insurance Company, SelectHealth. Their 33,000 employees serve patients and plan members in both urban and rural communities of Utah and southeastern Idaho. Intermountain decided to switch from a distributed IVR architecture consisting of one IVR in every store to a single central IVR at their corporate data center hosted in a virtual machine environment and supporting VoIP technology. To provide the best patient service level, Intermountain wanted to maintain each pharmacy’s local phone number which patients were accustomed to using. They also wanted to offer their patients new options such as Mail Order and Delivery services.
After comparing solutions from competitors, they chose Smart Solutions. According to Darryl Wagner, Manager of Community Pharmacies, “Smart was competitively priced, and able to accommodate our custom needs without excessive costs, especially related to central fill. The fact that we could also add Smart Solutions Web (SmartWeb) and Mobile (SmartMobile) Applications to create an integrated solution was a bonus.”
“Having to support IVRs at 25 different pharmacies can be a bit burdensome on your IT staff. For example, if you want to adjust your hours during holidays or perhaps change prompts, you must log in to each IVR.” Intermountain Healthcare now has one IVR expert instead of multiple. With the creation of a Call Center, all calls from all 25 pharmacies now hit one place, and the patient doesn’t know the difference. If for some reason the patient needs to speak to a local person in the pharmacy, the call is simply transferred back. According to Darryl, “our staff is now able to focus more on the patient’s special needs in the pharmacy, without as many telephone interruptions.”
The SmartCall 7 Enterprise IVR includes a central management tool which allows you to make configuration changes to each pharmacy’s settings via one central administration tool. There is no need to log into each individual pharmacy IVR.
Because the IVR needed to be tightly integrated with Intermountain Healthcare’s existing IT and Telcom infrastructure, Smart Solutions worked closely with other vendors and service providers such as Avaya, Mckesson, Adtran and WindStream to provide a complete and compatible end-to-end solution which leveraged ongoing initiatives such as migration to virtualized servers and an Enterprise VoIP rollout.
Darryl commented, “The SmartCall 7 Enterprise IVR was 20-25% less than competitor’s offers, and the support is incredible. We can call them 24/7 and are always guaranteed an extremely quick response. We required a lot of customization, and Smart would not stop until they found a solution for each of our needs.”