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

01
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.
03
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.
04
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

01
Order management in healthcare is significantly more challenging than traditional retail order management.
02
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.
04
When providing order and onboarding status to patients, the data and internal processes must be consistently executed by both the call center and IVA®.
05
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.
06
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®.
07
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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Outcome: Fewer calls end up in the call center, allowing agents to focus on high-value activities and saving significant expenses for J&B.

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