Technical Support Done Right
This week I am talking to Chris Wickersham, Director, CereCore who provide EHR implementations, IT and application support. In Chris’ case his origin story and underlying personal driver was a woman looking for help to get a hospital bound patient to their son’s wedding before they died. They managed to help and make this happen virtually jumping through a number of technical and logistical hurdles but that experience set Chris on his journey centered on customer support.
Like the rest of the world Chris and Cerecore struggled to manage the new Pandemic age we entered and importantly viewed the challenges of technology not just through the lens of patients but also the clinical staff who were struggling to deal with their clinical workload while juggling technical challenges made even more prescient with the acceleration of Telehealth that was no longer a nice to have but an essential part of healthcare delivery.
It was not just Telehealth that exploded onto our stage but also the healthcare portals which like Telehealth became essential tools for communication between all the physically separated parties involved in care and the patients receiving care and their families.
Listen in to hear how Chris and his team were able to pivot their organization to remote in short order, how they deal with health inequity and the digital divide and their focus on mitigating the huge strains on everyone’s brain health.
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Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden
Thanks for tuning in today, I’m Dr. Nick the incrementalist. Join me as I seek out the small incremental changes being applied in other industries that we can learn from, and that can be applied in healthcare. Can these changes bring immediate value, but also add up to the big improvements and revolution we need in healthcare. Come along with me to explore the possibilities. My innovative guests from around the globe have used small incremental improvements to achieve their moonshot. And this week, I’m delighted to welcome Chris Wickersham. He is the director of circor. Chris, thanks for joining me today. Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Dr. Nick. So this is an exciting episode. It’s coming from hims. We’re recording it live, you’re here with us, we’re using appropriate safety precautions. But it’s fun to actually be in a studio, even if it’s physically distant. excited to have you here, as I do with all of my guests, it’s a good thing, just to get a little bit of a background, share a little bit of your history and how you arrived at this point in your career.
Chris Wickersham
Sure, absolutely. I’d be happy to Dr. neck. So when I was working my way through college, I started taking calls, providing it support for physicians and nurses around the country for various hospital systems, I really developed a passion for that, as I as I was able to resolve issues and really get users providers nurses back to focusing on what they like to do most, which is providing patient care. So as I started doing that, I really just kind of grew to love the industry, worked into EHR implementations, especially into the big boom across the Affordable Care Act and the EHR implementations around the country. And continue to hone my skills and develop that but really where the passion came in was working with working with patients, you get you get different various calls. And I have I have a particular story that I may share that really hooked me into the business. It was about three to four months onto the job, I received a call from a woman that was working into the foundation. I was I received a call from a woman that was working in the foundation and a patient, unfortunately was on his last legs had a couple hours to work or about 48 to 72 hours to live. And his oldest son was getting married. So we were looking to see, you know what we could do to make his last moments on Earth a little a little better. So what we were able to do was work with the onsite technology team, set up a video Skype sessions, one at the altar and one at the foot of his bed. And he was able to see his oldest son get married shortly after he passed away. About a week later, I received a email from the family itself. And I still have that email today. And it was just you see how how thankful how amazing people were, you know how amazing how amazed and happy they were and grateful that particular hospital system could really not only focus on the care, but also the comfort. And at that moment, I really realized that healthcare is really the place to be and really wanted to focus on patients, providers, nurses, seeing it is an enablement to their patient care experience as opposed to a barrier.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, you know, what a great story. I mean, I think we all have our sort of critical patient stories where that intersection with a patient that relatives, you know, the importance of healthcare, and what I’m often heard to say is, you know, healthcare is very personal. It’s, it doesn’t matter if you have that story or not, you’ve got some intersection through your relatives through the people that you engage with your family, friends. So we all have that connection. And that’s really what drives this industry. It’s all this goodwill and desire to sort of affect change. So, you know, fascinated to hear that. I think it’s just wonderful that we’re able to help out in you know, what a really quite difficult circumstances for those families. As you think about Sarah Corr, tell us a little bit about the company and what it is that you focus on and what you do.
Chris Wickersham
Sure. So Sara core provides IT solutions for healthcare, healthcare companies around the around the country. Really My area of focus is in the managed service areas, whether it’s helped us support application management support, network infrastructure, service support, and all the way into the the Patient Support experience. So really, you know, we see ourselves as being the link to the patient care in a way that really enables providers to, as I mentioned earlier, focus on the patient in front of them not focus on that computer issue, that network issue that might be going on. We really pride ourselves on being able to keep systems up at a very high rate of when there is a problem, identify it quickly get the right resume, get the right resolving groups. On the call engaged and resolved as quickly as possible. So the outside of, you know, my area and the managed services, we also provide other healthcare solutions from staffing, staffing, solutions, staffing agencies, web design, advising, advising, consulting, and so on so far.
Nick van Terheyden
So if I was to sort of summarize that, and forgive me, it’s gonna, it sounds a lot like technical support for patients for the system for all of the providers, you know, that it’s, it’s almost one of the areas that we all sort of intersect with in lots of different industries, not just healthcare. Right? And let’s be frank, it’s a really difficult area to be successful in No,
Chris Wickersham
no, you’re absolutely on point, it is a very difficult, you know, area to be successful in. And it’s truly magnified in the patient care space, it’s truly magnified and healthcare. You know, if you’re working as a cable provider, and the cable goes out, somebody can’t watch their the TV or the football match that’s on. If you lose connectivity into a hospital system, vitals are no longer crossing into a patient chart, you’re no longer able to order meds for a particular patient. So it’s it’s truly a very difficult environment to work in all of our employees, we’re so happy and proud to have them with us, because we all share that same passion, that same passion for patient care. It goes beyond the paycheck, it’s really a higher calling and a duty that we all come to perform.
Nick van Terheyden
You know, it’s interesting. And as you talk about that, and the challenge of it type support, you think about the additional layer, you know, in the story that you told of, you know, the patient who can’t get to that event, you know, providing that, can you imagine the frustration that might exist in those patients trying to deal with technology they have layered on sickness, health problems, challenges of medications, you name it, and suddenly the button isn’t working. I mean, we’ve all experienced, it doesn’t matter what technology and you know, I’m probably infamous online for calling out folks when you know, the technical support just doesn’t work.
How do you reconcile that and provide a support infrastructure that helps deal with that, because that’s just that’s not ordinary it supports in my mind.
Chris Wickersham
Now, no, one it’s not. And and I think, you know, our culture our focus is, is not only on the patients, but on our employees. And I think providing the right support structure for for our employees to really understand and see that we care for them that we care for the environment, it really helps them see the same purpose that we have. Just as an example, when our service desk, our support agents, every single one of those are automatically added to a patient’s support queue. The reason why we do this is we truly feel that it gives them that direct hand in the patient experience. You’re not just an agent, that’s troubleshooting and network connection over the phone, you’re actually somebody that’s talking to a patient, a parent of a sick child that is in need of medical attention, medical care, and and feeling that experience. So it’s it’s a difficult place, but at the same time, it can be extremely rewarding.
Nick van Terheyden
So I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that COVID-19 made your job an awful lot easier, right? Oh, yeah.
Chris Wickersham
Define easy. Yeah, I mean, it was it was transformational. COVID. You know, like it or not, it was a disruption. It was a disruption to the entire industry. For us, we you know, and I’ll focus on the Service Desk again, we were a brick and mortar company, we were working inside of Nashville, brick and mortar,
Nick van Terheyden
what’s the
Chris Wickersham
Oh, I’m sorry, we were, we were working physically on site at a location. And, and, and COVID. In 72 hours, we enabled all of our agents to work from from home. We didn’t know what was going to happen, the lockdown started. And we provided the right technology, we provided the right you know, support system to allow them to work efficiently from home. But at the same time, while all this is happening, and we’re trying to keep our operation moving, the disruption to the overall healthcare industry happened. So we’re just trying to keep up with everything that the organizations were going through, whether it was the cancellation of electives, where you know, providers were being furloughed, where employees are being furloughed, and you’re trying to kind of keep up with the HR identity access management piece of it. But at the same time, all of these healthcare systems are rushing. And they’re they’re, you know, focused that these telehealth initiatives that they had five to seven year plans and were expedited do a four week timeframe. So we were on the other side of that just making sure that both the organization and the patients were supported throughout that entire process.
Nick van Terheyden
So I imagined that telehealth was an additional layer of complexity, which previously was it was nice to have And to be clear, that’s not my sort of position. I think You know, it was historically that it was how it was perceived, we moved on from there, telehealth became a necessity. But now suddenly you’re dependent on all this technology that we carry around laptops, whatever. And people are trying to access this. That’s their only access. And it’s not working, and you’re right in the middle of it.
Chris Wickersham
That’s correct. That’s correct. And, and it affected both sides. You know, it wasn’t just in the past to your point, it wasn’t nice to have the areas where telehealth were being promoted, were in rural areas where maybe you couldn’t get a specialist that was 90 miles away over there. So you would you would focus on a telehealth visit for initial console. But now and you know, heavily urban areas, heavily densely populated areas, you’re just trying to keep everybody as socially distant as possible. And this became the necessity. So when it came to the telehealth aspect of it from the provider experience, you know, these are some providers that haven’t worked in telehealth either. And there’s a lot of not only the technology, obstacles that are in the way, and when I say what I mean by technology, obstacles, I’m talking about the hardware requirements, the peripherals, the webcams, the audio, things that things that happen that, you know, you just expect to work. But on the other side of that you also have your clinical workflows. So if we’re focusing on, let’s say, epic, my chart, for example, in order for me to actually initiate a visit, I have to run through a particular workflow in epic through a check in process that even enables me to enter the patient space. But that has to occur from both the provider side and the patient side. So we were providing two way education on both sides. And, you know, you weren’t exactly sure who you were going to get at any at any given time to kind of help initiate that process. And to that point, standard portal support was nice to have as well to somebody wanted to get in their chart, see what a lab result look like. This had a little bit more urgency to it, a provider was waiting on the other end of the phone, he has another appointment, that’s 2530 minutes down the road. So you had to kind of find quick resolutions fast and efficiently. And really, you know, there were times when we would be talking to a provider on one and we were talking to the patient and other agent was talking to the same patient that was you know, trying to kind of get into the same visit. So it was interesting to kind of see both sides of that paradigm and you know, the different information that we were able to provide hospital organizations to help optimize that experience, I think went a long way.
Nick van Terheyden
So for those of you just joining, I’m Dr. Nick the incrementalist today, I’m talking to Chris Wickersham. He’s the director of circle, we’re just talking about all of the changes that took place with COVID-19, telehealth all of this technology that’s just essentially washed over our systems, challenged both sides of that equation, the the clinicians who are trying to deal with all of this technology, it suddenly was no longer, you know, well, I could just deal with that I can call somebody, they can show up that elbow side training, and also importantly, the patient side of this that really sort of, you know, the the enormous stress associated with it. And you know, Chris, you brought it up, you talked about portals, tell me a little bit about what’s going on there. Because we’ve suddenly made them much more important. But you know, they don’t come with the best history in healthcare, right?
Chris Wickersham
Sure. I mean, it was always seen, it was always seen as an afterthought. And I was guilty of that, too. You know, seven, eight years ago, I go to a doctor’s visit, they’d have me, hey, sign up for my patient portal. What do I need this for? I’m not sure I really, really need to go through this. I mean, I need it when I’m sick. Right. But, you know, when it comes to the portal industry, we’ve we’ve saw an explosion of volume that happened right around that March, April timeframe, when COVID was happening, there was a lot more urgency to either connect with the provider to view lab results, particularly in a quick time period to see one where you recall the negative where you pulled the positive, but other aspects that you couldn’t get in for routine visits anymore. So you had to look at a digital experience that can, you know, somewhat replace that that in person experience that you’re having with your provider. So, you know, what we’ve seen with portals. We’ve seen registration from patients go up, we’ve seen volumes coming into our support desk from our support areas going up. But we’ve also seen that not only in the in the medium of calls, but we’ve seen it in the medium of you know, in basket messages, digital self service portal incidents, and really focusing on how we can we can quickly provide that that level of support to the patients. But there were a lot of other boundaries that came with that, you know, just generally activating an account, user administration issues that you see, but general navigation within within the portals themselves to do what you need to do. Some of these portals can do some amazing things. They really can. I mean, you can, you can request prescription refills, you can speak directly to your provider. You can schedule appointments online, you can pay bills, I mean, the level of activity that you can do in these areas is amazing, and it just continues to grow. So we’ve been getting a lot more questions and inquiries from patients as to how they can fully leverage what that experience looks like.
Nick van Terheyden
So, you know, let’s, let’s focus in a little bit on that. You know, one of the challenges with portals is I there’s like, 16 of them, they’re all different. You know, from a technical support standpoint, that’s got to be a nightmare. From a patient standpoint, it’s even worse than a nightmare. And then there’s the challenge of Okay, so there’s all those things you can do, Chris, but what happens if I can’t get in? Because that seems to be the primary chat? I mean, what’s a good portal experience in in, in, in the universe that you interact with? What what would you call as as a good experience? And what can we learn from that?
Chris Wickersham
That’s a great question. Doctor, I think a lot of this, when it comes to the good experience, the good experiences, a call never happens to me in the first place. They’re good experiences it in tactical support don’t occur. But when they do to your point, there’s several different portals out there. There’s some organizations themselves that have 1011 portals themselves based on different regions or locations that they have. So to your point, you know, the, the amount of portals that are out there can be quite burdensome for a patient and a lot of the calls, a lot of the interactions that we receive are just trying to find the right website, the right URL to get to the right hospital system that you’re there. So, you know, I think, from our perspective, you know, that good experience a call in directing them educated, educating the patient, getting them online, making sure they can see their medical records, that’s a win for us. But at the same time, how can we provide information to the organizations to eliminate that call in the first place? I think a lot of that goes into interoperability between hospital systems, we really have to look at ways that, you know, I’m going to focus on epic again, when it comes to the epic world, each organization may have their own my chart, if I go see a hospital system for in Colorado because I break an ankle skiing down a mountain. And I go back to my doctor in Nashville, Tennessee, how can I get that information on my portal? How does that occur today? Now in the clinical world, outside of the patient portal, there’s, you know, epic Connect where different epic systems are sharing information. But that isn’t quite crossing over into the patient experience. Yeah. And I think, you know, that, to me is one of the biggest barriers to really improving or increasing that patient experience is just allowing them to see what I like to call their personal health record their PHR as EHR agnostic, everything that happens to you within your life is within your fingertips. And, you know, I think I think that’s a challenge of the industry to really see how we can make that happen and make that more efficient for the patient.
Nick van Terheyden
So as you think about some of the challenges and addressing them, one of the things that really strikes me about the covid 19 pandemic is we had mental health problems to start with. I mean, that’s been a huge burgeoning problem. I despise the term mental health, I talk brain health, but you know, for the purposes of making sure that people understand what we’re referencing, but imagine that from a perspective of an individual that’s challenged with both, you know, interacting with people, does this interaction through digital technology improve things? Are you able to sort of, you know, how do you how do your support staff cope with that they seen evidence of it is, you know, other things that we can learn to help that particular group that I think is very disenfranchised in systems?
Chris Wickersham
That’s a fantastic question. And I wish I had a great answer for you, because I think we’re all still trying to figure that out. But when it comes to that, you know, we offer an omni channel approach for support, whether it’s through chat through self service portal, but the most rewarding ones are still the phone call. Because to your point, mental health, you’re cooped up for a year to this pandemic, just being able to talk to somebody else, just being able to have that positive interaction, that great customer service experience. I really think that goes, that goes a long way. And I think that’s the most rewarding thing for some of our agents when they truly feel like they help someone over the phone, but it’s not just, Hey, I got you and goodbye, it’s, let me show you how you can do some other cool things in here. Let me provide you some great education, on how we can kind of move that forward. So I mean, in my, in my view, mental health can can can be improved by interactions through humans, I really truly believe that we’re, you know, social people by nature. And I think that that continuous intercommunicate of, you know, interactions that happened and occur positively can have a greater impact on the overall mental health of the of the patient experience.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, no, I think that’s exactly right. We have to sort of make that as easy as possible. We’ve got to sort of take account of it, allow for it. One of the other areas that you know, hugely underserved is the sort of the disconnect. Those folks that don’t have access and you know, it sounds like a little bit you know, your omni channel approach. I’m guessing people if they don’t have a smart You know, there’s 37 million people that are essentially disconnected from the digital health world through, you know, lack of internet access or lack of technology, but they can still call in. And I think it sounds like Sarah core is trying to service that group as well.
Chris Wickersham
Yeah, no, that’s absolutely, that’s absolutely correct. And, you know, when it comes to that, that digital divide, I mean, I think as a society, that’s a challenge that we have to continue to work to overcome. You know, that that phone call experience, that phone call experience, you know, could be could be seen as very helpful. But patient portal by nature requires that that standard internet connectivity, so you know, I think that will always be a challenge until we fix some of the societal problems that we have. Or we can provide more Internet access across the country to those very rural areas that don’t have that broadband internet access. I think that I mean, I think that’s continuously going to be a problem. Now, you know, one of our challenges to that kind of comes to that point is, if you have the patient that doesn’t have that internet access, if they call us for support, it’s a challenge for us, because we’re not clinicians, we’re not going to be able to go and read your chart, tell you what your lab result means and give you some advice on how that works. But what we can do is we can take that information, we can understand what they’re looking for, and we can find their you know, the provider that’s on their file, we can warm connected with warm, transfer them, connect them over to their provider to kind of help help marry that gap and really help, you know, provide the clinical advice that they need.
Nick van Terheyden
So in the last few minutes remaining, what are you excited about? what’s what’s coming to this world of technology that, you know, will turn technical support portals to be a positive word that patients go? Yeah, I get a great experience. What have you learned? What incremental steps have you found through this that you think others could learn from and apply?
Chris Wickersham
You know, that’s, that’s a great question. And thinking about it, I think when it comes to our side, a lot of our focus, overall Sara course focus, when it comes to support methodology, we employ something called shift left methodology. And what the idea of that is that you’re always shifting the next level of support down to the end user. So for example, if there’s a unresolvable issue by a service desk agent, and it goes to a level two technician, how can we take that and move that to the first level? how to how to in on top of that, how do I take that first level issue? For example, a password reset, or I don’t know, my username, or I, you know, I can’t see my lab results, how do I get that information, and take that out of the service desk and put that directly into the into the hands of the patient themselves? So they don’t so that eliminates that that actual interaction? I think one of the areas that we’re really looking into at Sarah core is developing some of the usage in the chatbot technology as it relates directly into the portal world using RPA. I’m sorry, robotic process automation, to basically be able to read charts, read areas with patient experiences, and provide them the information at their fingertips. I think that usage there I think that’s gonna be I think the Amazons of the world. I think the the Googles of the world, how many times are they calling a support desk for help, I mean, everything’s right there on their on their site, they’ve developed so much different pieces of technology that you have everything you need, and it’s truly a self help world. So I think I think that’s one key piece that we look at is continuing to push that information left directly into the shareholder. And we look at that outside of the portal experience, we’re trying to do the same thing with providers, we’re trying to do the same thing with nurses, front desk, administrative executives, anybody in the healthcare realm. The other side, you know, telehealth is here to stay. I think it’s focusing on the trends and telehealth focusing on how we can improve what that experience looks like, you know, I think we’re going to be moving away from or not, we’re going to be moving away, there’s going to be more peripherals that are that are jumping into the full, you know, right now you’re looking at camera and audio. But we’re at hims. Today, I started just looking around, you know, looking at some booths, there’s some really cool technology as it relates to telehealth, and how do you embed that into the patient experience? So, you know, I think, when it comes to that piece, I think it’s the use of self help technology, predictive analytics to see what patients need and then just improve improving and optimizing the telehealth paradigm.
Nick van Terheyden
Yeah, I think great points. But the one thing I would add to that, that, you know, I talked about in other areas, but I think applies here is, you know, for all of the people that work in IT support and whatever, I challenge them always go experience it from the patient perspective or the clinician perspective, because it’s so easy to be wrapped up. And well this is obvious, you know, and when I was providing technical support to my, you know, 80 plus year old mother, you know, she had a difference paradigm, different challenges, and that was always very leveling for me. And I think that’s one of the things that I would say from an incremental standpoint, you know, applying that but You know, it’s not just about the technology, as you said, it’s about the engagement, the interaction, the humanity of that technical support. That’s important. Unfortunately, as usual, we’ve run out of time. And just remains for me to thank you, Chris, for joining me. It’s been a delight. I think, you know, it’s an exciting time we’ve seen this explosion of technology, it’s really important. It’s critical to the future that has changed dramatically as a result of the pandemic. And you’re definitely part of that. So thanks for joining me, Chris.
Chris Wickersham
The pleasure is all mine. Dr. Nick, thank you so much.
Nick van Terheyden
Thanks for joining me today. Do you have any better ideas? Or have you found a small incremental change that’s brought about a big improvement in your world? Let’s continue the conversation on our hashtag the incrementalist or share with me at Dr. Nick one on Twitter. You can find more information about the show on our program page at healthcare now radio.com. and tune in next time to hear my discussions with leaders and innovators from around the globe who have revolutionized their space by using small incremental improvements to achieve their moonshot. I’m Dr. Nick the incrementalist and I’m starting a revolution through evolution.
