Case studies

Oregon Health & Science University Hospital

Overview

The contact center is the main communication hub of a hospital or health system. Individual departments often look to the contact center as the source of truth for staff directory, code call workflows, and more. An effective communication solution creates a solid foundation for capturing, storing, securing, and analyzing data. Many healthcare organizations create this foundation thinking it’s a “one and done” operation. But maintaining a robust communication solution means meticulous upkeep of various staff directories and on-call calendars for ongoing support of these critical functions. See the results this organization achieved by partnering with Spok. This use case offers tips for establishing accurate, relevant data across your organization.

The challenge

Operators were spending too much time making manual data updates to the system and the data provided was not complete. A lack of trust in how the data was organized caused additional manual work across OHSU.

One of the core challenges at OHSU was inaccurate and outdated data. This made it difficult for all users to find contact details quickly and efficiently. OHSU, in collaboration with the Spok Professional Services Team, outlined what items needed to be addressed to ensure accuracy of the Spok data. This included directory listings, individual listings, on-call groups, and message groups. Overall, the goal was to remove most of the manual database management by replacing manual processes with automation. These solutions benefit not only the hospital but the entire organization, including the OHSU Health System.

Project activities

  • Conducted a comprehensive workflow analysis to identify the root cause of these issues
  • Defined new operational and organizational polices for data governance and integrations
  • Identified, isolated, and consolidated available data sources
  • Initiated a nightly feed by consolidating four data sources into one (OHSU and partner HR system, student system, and provider system)
  • Identified data to be cleaned prior to system automation being established
  • Created business rules to automate the onboarding and offboarding processes
  • Created automated reports used to follow up on paging device/services
  • Identified audit reports (used monthly, quarterly, and annually to ensure data integrity)
  • Implemented best practices to ensure staff receive the proper training and change management support to ensure success

The result

The data project at OHSU is ongoing. The initial results are very positive, and OHSU is encouraged by how these standard data practices are starting to improve business outcomes. Specifically, they’re eager to streamline directory information to improve efficiencies.

Getting started on your data optimization project

Maintaining the integrity of data is essential for ensuring your communication solution is effective. Often, the data within an enterprise database is unstructured, existing in various formats with differing naming conventions, and containing duplicates and other anomalies. An experienced Spok data consultant can help you clean your data in your existing Spok Care Connect® suite.