TeleWare, a leader in communications technology, has started working with innovative new concierge medical service Akea Life. Together they are offering patients and clinicians peace of mind and best practice customer service.
This is delivered through a simple to use and highly scalable communications software solution developed by TeleWare. All Akea Life’s communications are routed, recorded and analysed, to ensure all records of patient consultations are available on demand. This means medical notes are exact and patient service standards can be of the highest quality. All exceeding Care Quality Commission best practice guidelines.
Concierge medical service
Akea Life is an exciting new concierge doctor service in the North West of England. The company launched a subscription wellness service in February of this year. It already counts premier league football clubs, North West based corporates and local families amongst its patients.
Patients, who sign up monthly, are assigned their own personal doctor who manages all aspects of their health care. The Care Quality Commission regulated scheme will also offer instant access to specialists for blood tests, vaccinations, health screening, physiotherapy, mental health care and other health services.
One huge service advantage, alongside extended everyday opening hours, is the mobility of Akea’s offer. The doctors come to you. Ben Paglia founder and MD explains, “Akea is a twenty first century take on a modern family GP practice. The crux of our offer is home visits. You simply pick up the phone and you can speak to one of our doctors very, very quickly. The upshot is that normally within an hour, two hours you’ll have a doctor at the door. We like to think it’s a very convenient service. It’s hopefully going back to sort of slightly more traditional values of healthcare.”
Wanting to offer a premium service, the team needed the ability to record patient calls and Skype sessions. Not for compliance purposes, but for the safety and security of both doctors and patients.
Ben Paglia continues, “Most initial patient contact is by phone, so we need to be able to capture the session. We already had the phones and computers in place, but needed a partner with a simple, cost efficient and scalable software solution to record and analyse calls, texts, emails, Skype sessions and IM.”
Having recorded sessions means that the team can have the confidence of knowing that they can go back and review information that’s conveyed to patients. “We are dealing with the most precious commodity a person has, their health”, Paglia adds.
SIMple solution
Each doctor has a SIM in their phone that records their calls and sends them to the cloud. In this case, Microsoft Azure. This way Akea can track performance and capture any evidence for potential complaints or queries. As well as for training and quality purposes.
Driving itself to set best in class quality service, Akea has as a self-imposed eight weekly call audit. This is where the management team go back over a selection of patient calls. Checking everything from bedside manner and tone, to level of medical advice. This is then shared confidentially amongst the medical team so service levels can be constantly elevated.
Paglia continues, “TeleWare was an obvious choice for us. They are leaders in the call recording field. They know how to integrate with Microsoft programmes and have a totally scalable solution. Which is critical for a new business looking to control costs. What really made a difference was they matched our customer first ethos. Nothing was too much trouble.”
Mark Elwood, director of marketing from TeleWare added, “With a lot of our customers in regulated industries, so many of the solutions we put in place are for compliance purposes. It is great to see how call recording and analysis can be used as a basis for outstanding customer and patient service.”
TeleWare route, record and analyse
A user friendly dashboard allows you to assess how the system works. Users can see how much time is spent on the phone. For Akea Life, how many patients call each day and how long those calls go on for. An integral part of what they offer is telephone consultations and follow up, so having that ability to map and export that data into Excel is appreciated.
Paglia explains the importance of peace of mind. “I like the fact that the, the dashboard is very simple to use. We only have a handful of users now, but it is something that’s quite scalable so as we grow to 10, 15, 20 doctors, I can dip into their calls very easily. Being in the cloud means I can access the system from pretty much anywhere. Also, having the confidence that the system is backed up with Microsoft Azure is incredibly valuable. Having our data kept onshore in the UK is also important. It ticks all our data protection boxes.”
Having everything stored in the cloud through Microsoft Azure means it is highly scalable, very affordable and has the highest levels of data protection and quality. Which is imperative. This allows Akea Life to create and deliver the best possible levels of service and care.
Akea Life has ambitious plans, growing from a launch team of six doctors to 30-40 in three years time, with the ability to care for 10,000 patients nationwide. The Microsoft and TeleWare platform is set up to scale with them.