In Colombia, the (ESE) San Rafael Yolombó Hospital is a public entity that serves 20 nearby municipalities with a mostly rural population that has difficulty accessing health services due to the lack of technological channels; for example, to request a medical appointment, patients used to have to travel up to 6 hours by public transportation, a feat for them. This process with today's technology should be way easier.
To solve this problem, the Yolombó Hospital created its own Contact Center to attend all its appointments by telephone. However, it collapsed and could only attend 10% of the calls. They doubled the technical capacity of their Contact Center and even doubled their staff, which was also detrimental to their already existing financial crisis caused by the 40% no-show rate. This was to be expected as appointments were given three months after the request.
Yolombó Hospital decided to evolve and engage COCO, an AI-powered software that transformed the patient journey with digital healthcare solutions to improve the experience, revenue, and adherence. It started by automating contact centers using AI tools such as chatbots, automated online booking, and telemedicine. After just 4 months COCO has already implemented its services in 5 of its sites and has programmed +60 healthcare professionals who have served +50K patients. Today, 55% of its appointments are self-booked and Contact Center calls have been reduced by 90% (from 175,000 to 19,000 / month).
On the other hand, the financial crisis was overpassed. VoiceBots and ChatBots were activated to confirm appointments; Despite the lack of cellular signal in some places of its coverage area, automated calls increased attendance up to 90%, and today patient satisfaction is over 96%.
Nowadays, COCO is used in more than 100 medical centers in 4 countries. Moreover, COCO has won national and international prizes --including one EVPA Award of the pharma AstraZeneca. COCO projects to improve the patient journeys to dignify health access around the globe.
In only 4 months, COCO technology solutions helped to increase patient attendance, which helped; not only to reduce the number of petitions from the control entities and complaints from patients, but also helped to emerge from the financial crisis.
In only 4 months, COCO technology solutions helped to decrease the number of daily calls and free up time for the Contact Center agents to handle some calls.
*Watch a 30-minute video in Spanish posted on the YouTube channel of the Guayacanes Foundation in Medellin, Colombia. Only 2 months after the start of the implementation of COCO services https://youtu.be/tCZM7oVLfUc?t=5933 in which Dr. Ana Lucia Vanegas, Director of the Office of Planning and Information Systems of the ESE Hospital San Rafael de Yolombo [Department of Antioquia] presents the results.