The News: RingCentral has introduced new integrations with Electronic Health Record providers, which in combination with its AI-driven communications suite, creates a more unified patient care solution for healthcare organizations. More information on this announcement can be found on the RingCentral website.
RingCentral Announces Unified Patient Care Solution for Healthcare
Analyst Take: Supporting healthcare organizations and providing a positive patient experience can be complicated. While there are similarities to other verticals, which include the challenges of data silos, outdated technologies, and a disconnected customer/patient journey, providing a good experience in healthcare can differ from other segments in that it is far more nuanced. Patient experience is deeply personal, with extra layers of process, paperwork and regulation. There is also often the mismatch of patient expectations vs. reality, as patients expect their experience, whether digital or in person, to match what they receive as a consumer. RingCentral, which has served the healthcare vertical for a while, recently announced some integrations that should help bridge some of those gaps and shared how generative AI is helping to ease some of the pain points healthcare providers face daily.
Integrations with Electronic Health Record Providers
RingCentral announced new integrations with EHR providers, including major names such as Epic, Cerner and Allscripts. The company is leveraging its new partnership with SpinSci, a patient engagement software platform to put benefit into action. A big issue for healthcare providers, which in turn trickles down to patients, is disconnection along a patient journey which can be from poor workflows and systems that don’t talk to each other. This disconnection also does not allow a comprehensive view of a patient to be seen. Integrations such as these help that problem.
By connecting the ability to communicate and share information, in an optimal and secure way, mundane activities such as administrative tasks and documentation will be improved, and even more importantly, care delivery will can be provided more efficiently, and with potentially a bit more personalization. Similar to interactions for consumer purposes, patients can be frustrated by not feeling “known” or worse, needing to repeat information about themselves. RingCentral has Patient Assist feature which aims at that issue. Agents interacting with a patient will be able to know their name, the reason for the call and key parts of their medical record.
Generative AI Helps Providers Focus on Care
Ring Central outlined several ways its RingCentral for Healthcare solution is using generative AI, some focused on removing friction points and mundane tasks, with others working to harness data to improve interactions. Capabilities include:
- AI tools to assist with scheduling, reminders, and appointment follow-ups.
- Virtual agents that use AI to automate frequently seen inquiries or collect information before a patient is transferred to an agent. Again, this smooths out the interaction for the patient and makes it easier for the agent. For healthcare systems inbound/outbound queues can be blended to support differing call volumes, while auto-dialers take care of high volume activities like sending out surveys.
- Analytics of patient interactions that can provide a view into potential operational issues, as well as what patients are needing. This view considers not just call monitoring, but cross channel interactions as well. This is another way providers can get that larger picture view of a patient’s journey.
Strong Healthcare Adoption, Positive Results
RingCentral recently shared that the company has seen strong adoption of its healthcare solution, growing its customer base in this segment to more than 500 new customers (across all enterprise sizes) over the past year and a half.
Data out of a survey the company conducted last year, showed that customer in the healthcare segment experienced a 46% increase in staff productivity, a 53% increase in staff satisfaction and a 42% increase in HCAHPS patient satisfaction by using RingCentral’s HIPAA-compliant communications. The staff satisfaction statistic is an important one, as healthcare workers are particularly prone to employee risk factors such as burnout and disengagement.
Key Takeaways
These latest enhancements from RingCentral focus on key areas of customer experience, including connecting systems and leveraging data to provide a personalized, smoother journey and removing obstacles for providers to focus on higher value tasks and patient care. It will be interesting to see how the use of AI to support healthcare experience evolves in the coming year. I am sure we will be seeing more announcements like what we are seeing across the contact center space, with practical use cases such as summarization and virtual assistant features, but it will be the ability to harness and connect data where the even bigger benefits will come into play.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
As a detail-oriented researcher, Sherril is expert at discovering, gathering and compiling industry and market data to create clear, actionable market and competitive intelligence. With deep experience in market analysis and segmentation she is a consummate collaborator with strong communication skills adept at supporting and forming relationships with cross-functional teams in all levels of organizations.
Sherril holds a Master of Business Administration in Marketing from University of Colorado, Boulder and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Rutgers University.
