In Colombia, E.S.E Hospital de Yolombó is a public entity that serves 20 nearby municipalities with a mostly rural population that has difficulties in 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 real feat for them. This process with today's technology should be much easier.
To solve this problem, the Hospital (ESE) San Rafael Yolombó created its own Contact Center to attend all appointments by telephone. However, it collapsed and was only able to attend 10% of the calls.. They doubled the technical capacity of their contact center and even doubled their staff, which was also detrimental for their already existing financial crisis caused by the 40% non-attendance rate. This was to be expected, since the appointments were given three months after the application.
The Hospital decided to evolve and engage COCO, a software that with Artificial Intelligence transformed the experience of communication and medical appointments with digital health solutions, the institution's revenue and patient adherence. COCO started by automating call centers using chatbots, automated online booking and telemedicine. After only 4 months, COCO has already implemented its services in 5 of its locations and has programmed +¡more than 60 healthcare professionals who have served more than 50 thousand patients. At present, 55% of its appointments are booked by patients and calls to the Contact Center have been reduced by 90%. (from 175.000 to 19.000 per month).
On the other hand, the financial crisis was overcome. VoiceBots and ChatBots were activated to confirm appointments; despite the lack of cellular signal in some parts of their coverage area, automated calls increased attendance by up to 90%, and patient satisfaction now exceeds 96%..
Currently, COCO is used in more than 100 medical centers in 4 countries. In addition, COCO has won national and international awards, including an EVPA award from AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals. COCO works to improve the patient experience to dignify access to healthcare around the world.
In just 4 months, the COCO Technologies solution helped to increase patient attendance, which meant not only reducing the number of requests from monitoring entities and patient complaints, but also emerging from a financial crisis.
In just 4 months, COCO Technologies' solution helped reduce the number of daily calls and free up time for contact center agents to handle calls.
Ana Lucía Vanegas, Director of the Office of Planning and Information Systems of the ESE Hospital San Rafael de Yolombó [Department of Antioquia] presents her results.
