Client Spotlight: J&B Medical Supply Co.
J&B Medical Supply Co. provides medical and surgical products to patients, caregivers, health systems, clinics and first responders. Their core business is shipping consumables to patients on a regular basis (i.e. automatically and in compliance with Medicare and Medicaid regulations).
“SmartAction has been a long term partner and has allowed us to automate many of our simple to medium complexity calls, freeing up resources to focus on more value added activities. SmartAction has been a true collaborator as we continue to evolve our business.”– Dr. Stephen Shaya, CEO, J&B Medical Supply
Account Authentication:
The 8 Things You Need to Know
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J&B Medical Supply Co. provides medical and surgical products to patients, caregivers, health systems, clinics and first responders.
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Like all medical supply distributors, J&B is held to strict rules set forth by HIPAA.
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For years, the company had relied on their customer service reps to properly authenticate callers. As the company grew, so did call volumes. Soon, J&B needed to hire more agents.
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More agents = higher costs. They wanted to reduce the overall cost of live agents and introduce automation, but HIPAA caller authentication is very complicated.
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J&B began working with SmartAction, and implemented IVA® to authenticate callers.
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IVA® is HIPAA compliant and completely authenticates approximately three-quarters of all callers.
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Every authenticated call handled by IVA® now eliminates over two minutes of agent time on the phone.
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J&B’s agent population has shrunk and they’ve seen an average yearly savings of $200,000. They have also reduced agent attrition, which is important given the scarcity of skilled labor in the region.
10 Facts About Automating Medical Order Management
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Order management in healthcare is significantly more challenging than traditional retail order management.
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Orders require special prescription handling, which often means follow-up with providers.
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J&B also has a multi-step regulatory onboarding process and will not ship supplies until everything is in place.
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When providing order and onboarding status to patients, the data and internal processes must be consistently executed by both the call center and IVA®.
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Many patients call regularly to confirm, change, add to, or cancel their orders – especially if they run out of supplies earlier than their ship date or if their shipment has not arrived on time.
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For these frequent calls, patients can follow up on and resolve order delays using HIPAA compliant self-service, offered 24 hours a day through IVA®.
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IVA® provides up-to-date order status information and is able to completely resolve roughly 88% of callers with orders. The rest either don’t have pending orders or have more complex follow-up questions that need to be answered.
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Callers that do not have orders often fall into two buckets – patients who are reordering early and those that are missing an authorization/prescription (or it has expired).
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Average handle time for the Order Status portion of calls is as low as 30 seconds, despite the complexities.
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