Over the past three years, I have been delivering training for a startup health care call center in Denver, CO. The call center services multiple primary care clinics around the Denver metro area assisting them with scheduling appointments, provider-to-provider referrals, and 24/7 phone access to nurse triage services. At the start of 2018, I decided to change my department’s focus and have a more active role evaluating call transfers between our non-clinical agents and clinical team. 
One of the primary responsibilities of our clinical team is to triage patients over the phone which effectively reduce unnecessary medical costs for our patients. This service has been in place for about 30 years, however, three years ago they were integrated into the one-stop-shop virtual resource center idea which expanded our staff numbers when non-clinical positions were introduced. This new team would be responsible for inbound and outbound scheduling and referral management phone calls.
To continue reducing unnecessary costs for patients, our non-clinical team (aka Resource Specialists) were asked to use their active listening skills and capture any potential emergency or urgent symptoms a caller may share while trying to schedule an appointment or get information about their referrals. These “Hot Words” serve as trigger words which require the call is transferred to a nurse for triage.
Learning Need
Resource Specialists would now need to improve their active listening skill and basic medical knowledge to ensure patients requiring triage aren’t being missed. As member of the Training and Development team, I am responsible for delivering training and learning material to our non-clinical team so I have begun brainstorming a variety of ways to improve our team’s skills and knowledge to ensure all hot words are being captured. Prior to the start of my Instructional Design master’s degree, training was inadequate.
I have recently completed a Training Needs Analysis and discovered the team has been missing hot words primarily because they lack the necessary medical knowledge to think critically about potential outcomes when symptoms worsen. They may also benefit from realistic simulations to improve their empathy skill and raise motivation.
Learning Objectives
- Recognize emergency and urgent “hot words” during inbound and outbound patient phone calls.
- Obtain and transfer necessary patient information over the phone to complete a warm transfer to the clinical team.
- Apply active listening techniques to build trust, show understanding, and acquire information.
- Formulate follow-up questions during phone calls when emergency and urgent “hot words” are identified.
Learners
The team is made up of about 30 adults between ages 25-70 and the majority have a general understanding of medical terminology. Fortunately, I have found enormous success using e-learning courses to deliver training because all our learners are comfortable using technology. Courses are typically very linear which are easier to follow and motivates learners by rewarding when questions are answered correctly and courses are completed.
Training Structure and Tools
Learning will be structured primarily as an e-Learning course created using Adobe Captive and uploaded to TalentLMS. The course will include a variety of micro-learnings such as software simulations (how to videos), caller-agent scenarios, knowledge checks, and final assessment. In addition, I will create an infographic with an overview of the general nurse triage process as well as a handout with a list of common hot words. The infographic will be created in Adobe InDesign with many of its graphic elements created in Illustrator.
I am excited about this training and can’t wait to see the results!
