Smart Mobile RX: Simplifying Healthcare Prescriptions

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Like any robust industry, healthcare in America is a diverse and rapidly evolving field. And almost without exception the one area of the healthcare industry that impacts almost all of us is pharmaceuticals and prescriptions.

To understand how a mobile IVR application can help simplify the healthcare field, take a look at Smart Mobile RX — a flexible, nimble application that both improves efficiency and cuts costs for pharmacies, while also improving customer service with increased flexibility for the patient.

Basically, Smart Mobile RX is a cross-functional, fully-featured consumer pharmacy application — its core purpose is to make customer/pharmacy interactions simpler. Customers use it to be informed and get the medicine and treatment they need. Pharmacies use it to support their clients in a way that satisfies and retains customers.

It combines a host of the standard IVR functions retail consumers are increasingly demanding, plus crucial added elements of a mobile application. It seamlessly integrates with major retail pharmacy solutions like the PDX Pharmacy System. And it works on just about all smartphones and tablets currently available, including the iPhone, the iPad, Android phones, and more.

For customers, benefits range from simpler ordering capabilities to access to discounts and savings, including:

  • An SMS or text message when it’s time to refill a prescription
  • Simple “Smart Button” re-order capabilities, including handy responses from pharmacies like confirmation and pick up times and reminders
  • Access to wellness and health information, which improves education and helps patients better understand what they need.
  • Customer loyalty alerts and reward offerings for savings opportunities.
  • Store locator services, for easier access.
  • Alerts and prescription compliance reminders.

For pharmacies, benefits range from boosted accuracy and quality assurance to improved long-term customer loyalty, including:

  • Fewer product bin returns to stock for forgotten prescriptions, which reduces waste and improves sales.
  • Improved customer retention and increased customer sales through push notifications regarding store specials.
  • Reduced staff involvement on non-critical status checks, which increases time for in-depth consulting with in-store patients.
  • Boosted store performance through increased residual purchases.

In other words, it meets the needs of both pharmacies and patients. And folks are starting to notice — here are some kind words from the Unitek College nursing school:

The Dallas-based company designed the application for use by pharmacies that are currently on their Enterprise Pharmacy System and PDX Pharmacy System brand prescription filling software. Participating pharmacies and related professionals, like San Francisco pharmacy technicians, can use the Smart Mobile RX app to notify customers, via email or rich-text format messages, of important services like medication refills.

Made for use with almost any kind of email client or smartphone, the soon-to-be released technology can also be applied to traditional phone messages.

“Acclaim’s Smart Mobile RX allows any brand of Smart Phone, for the first time, to provide consumers with additional features through the use of a single interactive portal eliminating the need to develop separate applications for each unique mobile device. Smart Mobile RX’s feature rich message offerings save valuable time and money while enabling Pharmacy Retailers to increase store revenues,” said James Davis, President of Acclaim Telecom Services.

Smart Mobile RX is just one example of the kinds of applications we’re developing that make life easier for both businesses and their customers. Contact one of our mobile application development specialists to learn about what we can do for your business.

Customer Service, Metrics and Lies

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I stumbled across an interesting article last week while doing research on the internet. The article was written by Matt Flemming, founder of Flemming Consulting, LLC.  I must confess it was the title that caught my attention:  Lies, Damned Lies and Call Center Statistics.

Acclaim Telecom Services has been developing Call Center IVR Applications since 1993.  While developing these IVR applications we are heavily involved in areas such as:

  • Analysis and optimization of call flows and critical decision points,
  • Speech analytics and VUI design,
  • Application tuning,
  • Developing custom reports,
  • And a plethora of other areas necessary to develop and support Call Center applications.

But we are rarely involved in the on-going analysis of the actual call center’s operation in an effort to optimize customer satisfaction as well as the call center’s performance.  That’s were Matthew’s expertise comes into play.

Matt  takes an interesting approach in tackling several key measurements traditionally used to predict and manage Call Center performance.  He also takes issue with the validity of using many of these metrics when applied in less than a holistic view of a call center’s operation.

So take a look at some of the areas of Call Center metrics and operations that Matthew challenges you to think about differently.    They include:

  • Average time to abandon (ATA)
  • Average speed to Answer (ASA)
  • Service Level Objectives (SLO)
  • Understanding your call profile
  • Call Center Agent occupancy
  • Economies of scale & idle time
  • Cost per call

If you take the time to read his article Lies, Damned Lies and Call Center Statistics, we hope you find it of value.

And if you happen to contact Matt, please tell him the folks at Acclaim Telecom said hello.

How Speech Recognition Improves Lives, Continued

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Here’s something amazing — these days, you don’t even need the power of speech to take advantage of speech recognition technology.

We’ve been talking a bit about some of the extraordinary ways speech recognition applications can improve life for everyday people, as well as businesses; and not just with IVR systems.

Previously, we highlighted a paralyzed man and father-of-four who — thanks to reality TV hit “Extreme Home Makeover” (the one where they “move that bus!” and reveal a thoroughly remodeled home for a family in need) — could live more independently in a house equipped with assistance from voice recognition. More than 250 tasks that had always been difficult to complete from his wheelchair could be done via voice commands that responded exclusively to Carl’s voice.

Here’s another inspiring way Speech Recognition technologies can help those in need:

Al Keneda lost his vocal cords — and his voice — to cancer 16 years ago.

He remembers the panic he felt when he awoke in the ICU unable to speak, and the challenges of learning to communicate without his voice. In the beginning, he communicated with a white board and a pen. Then, with something called an electrolarynx — a cylindrical metal device about 3 or 4 inches long that he holds to his throat when he speaks.

“I used this for three years before I got my voice prosthesis,” he says in the robotic voice produced by the electrolarynx. “It was a barrel of laughs.”

Recently, at a scientific conference in Washington, D.C., German researchers showed off a technology that might work even better for Keneda — once it’s perfected. The system, called EMG-based Silent Speech Recognition, relies on a computer to construct words by reading the muscles in the face.

(Read the whole inspiring story here).

The basic idea isn’t too much different than a computer learning to read lips. A person can mouth words without actually saying them, which is enough for a computer to interpret the muscle movements and detect words. So far, the technology can recognize more than 2,000 words with 90 percent accuracy.

Here at Acclaim Telecom, we love seeing how Speech Recognition can improve lives in such a broad variety of ways. And while most IVR systems are not used in the medical manner described in this blog, our goal is to use this innovative technology to make life as easy as possible for both businesses and their valued customers who utilize IVR systems.

At its core, customer service is getting folks what they need — whether by answering questions, solving problems, responding quickly to information requests, or guiding them a more complex  procedure. Our turnkey speech recognition applications can make big a difference, both simplifying the process of getting help for customers, and saving companies costs while doing it. Enterprise-critical IVR solutions are win-win, and we’ve been developing them since 1993.

Cloud Computing – Where does IVR fit in?

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The buzz and discussion around cloud computing continues to heat up and generate ever increasing levels of interest.  It seems there are as many definitions of cloud computing as there are vendors offering their services in the “Cloud”.  In order for a company to take advantage of the many offerings, it makes sense to understand the fundamental components that make up the “Cloud”.  So we thought it might make sense to take a step back and look at the basics of cloud computing.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (www.nist.org) provides a comprehensive definition of Cloud Computing.   It can be summarized as:

Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

The definition goes further indicating this cloud model promotes availability and is composed of five essential characteristics:

1 – On-demand self-service,

2 – Broad network access,

3 – Resource pooling,

4 – Rapid elasticity, and

5 – Measured Service

And finally there are three service models to this definition:

1 – Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS),

2 – Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS), and

3 – Cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

We will focus on the Software as a Service (SaaS) since it is the model level IVR services are offered.

The original concept of SaaS can actually be traced back to the early IBM mainframe days where the concept of time-sharing first developed.  Obviously a major difference between time-sharing and SaaS is that the service was delivered primarily through hardwired connections as the internet did not exist at that time.   With the internet expanding in the 1990s, another acronym came into being, the ASP (Application Service Provider).  Centralized computing resources were utilized to provide software hosting services of specialized software applications.  The intent of this service was to reduce the overall cost through centralized administration of hardware and software systems.   SaaS is an extension of this original ASP model.

The SaaS acronym is said to have first appeared in an article called “Strategic Backgrounder: Software as a Service”, published in February 2001 by the Software & Information Industry’s (SIIA) eBusiness Division. 1

However you wish to define it; IVR Hosted Services or  IVR as a SaaS, IVR functionality is a great application to deploy to the Cloud.   Why?

First, one of the key benefits of a SaaS model is to provide services in a “one to many” model.  That is a single or central service providing services to many end-users.  IVR applications have a long history of doing just that even when not deployed in a hosted services or SaaS model.

Second, IVR systems are well suited to a centralized support environment for software upgrades, hardware upgrades, operating system upgrades, and specialized system software upgrades.  In many cases, IVR systems deployed in a SaaS model will bring upgraded and improved system features before many users could afford it if they had purchased the equipment directly.  In effect they benefit from  piggybacking on the requirements of other customers whose needs  drive the necessity for improved or enhanced features more rapidly.

Third, IVR application development requires very specialized development skills.  These specialized skills apply not only in the application coding effort, but also in the area of requirements analysis, call flow development, vocal user interface (VUI) development, specialized stress or load testing, and post implementation application tuning.  Due to the nature of most IVR applications, these skills are not typically needed throughout the enterprise once the application(s) have been deployed, and therefore are expensive resources to keep on hand if not utilized fully.

Fourth, some applications are only needed for  a short time or when demand spikes significantly.  A few examples include specialized surveys, special event announcements, temporary emergency service offerings, new product support efforts, seasonal surveys, or service outage coverage.  The need for speed of rapid development and deployment most often exceed the capabilities of I.T. development staff members who do not specialize in IVR application development.

Fifth, is scalability and elasticity.  Sometimes demand for a service exceeds expectations and let’s hope that is a good thing.  Not being able to respond quickly enough can be a bad thing.  Being able to scale capacity up or down based on demand while only paying for actual needed capacity is a powerful benefit.  With few exceptions, accurately predicting demand, ordering needed additional equipment, increasing network capacity, and installing and testing the application(s) rarely take place in a scheduled or orderly manner if increasing demand is stressing the organization.

And finally, the cost of incremental capital equipment comes into play.   In some cases the need to scale a system may only be marginally greater than existing installed equipment.  However, it is not always possible to scale a system to just the level desired, and you can be forced to scale a system based on minimum equipment upgrade paths.  That can be hampered further if you have an older installed system with an application that works well, but the IVR vendor no longer supports an upgrade path for your existing system.

IVR is a proven and powerful tool in increasing customer support functions, enhancing call center operations, and providing quick and easy retrieval of highly repetitive or common information retrieval tasks.  Deploying IVR systems in a Saas or Hosted Services model is another step in the evolution of increasing the ROI on IVR usage and allowing greater flexibility for the users of IVR applications

1 – “Software as a Service Strategic Backgrounder” , Software and Industry Information Association,  Washington, D.C.   February, 2001