UHealth IT Integrates New Customer Relationship Management Platform with UChart

The University of Miami Health System’s (UHealth) Information Technology department continues to be a leader in providing innovative solutions that enhance patient experience at UHealth and the Miller School of Medicine. On March 1, UHealth became the first health system in South Florida, and one of the first in the industry, to implement Cheers, Epic’s customer relationship management (CRM) platform.

The goal of implementing Cheers is to help provide outstanding service to patients, providers, insurers and others who contact the organization. Cheers helps provide this outstanding service because it allows staff to quickly record contact information, review correspondence histories, monitor outstanding issues and flag issues for follow-up by routing details between appropriate user pools, staff members or work queues.

Now available to all UHealth billing departments and call centers, the Cheers platform seamlessly integrates with the electronic medical record system, UChart, through a highly collaborative and cross-functional effort led by the UHealth IT Project Management Office (PMO) in partnership with Epic.

Over a series of weekly governance meetings, members from UHealth IT’s PMO, training, Cadence, Resolute Billing and security teams consulted with stakeholders from UConnect, patient access, billing and the international group to determine the unique CRM needs of each call center. Additionally, the UHealth IT team met with the group that manages UHealth’s call center software, Nice inContact, to ensure that the calls flowed appropriately.

After conducting several demos for the community and training sessions for users, the team was fully prepared to facilitate a successful go-live. The implementation has yielded several positive results for patients, including shortened call handling time, with more relevant information available to UHealth staff during patient interactions.

Platform Integration Leads to Workflow Efficiencies

The integration performed by the UHealth IT team has not only improved the patient experience but has significantly improved workflows and communications between call centers (billing, patient access, UConnect and international group) and downstream areas (cardiology, CTU and CIV) at UHealth.

For example, call centers that are live with this functionality now have a streamlined process for reviewing patient information. When a call comes in, the Epic Hyperspace screen displays a pop-up that lists patient records that match the caller’s phone number. From here, the user can double-click the record which will now open up directly into the CRM Call Hub as opposed to the appointment desk.

The CRM Call Hub displays relevant caller information, such as resolved/unresolved CRMs, future appointments, referrals that need to be scheduled, etc.

“Implementing Cheers was a complex project that took close collaboration and teamwork from many stakeholders,” said David W. Reis, Ph.D., UHealth chief information officer. “I’m proud of the great work our UHealth team accomplished to enhance our patients’ experience.”

Because of the successful implementation, UHealth IT is looking to expand this functionality to additional areas in the future.

Tags: Cheers platform, CRM, customer relationship management, Dr. David W. Reis, Epic, IT, UChart, UHealth IT