Centro Clínico Gaúcho’s Call Center Eliminates Missed Calls Now That Patients Use Online Scheduling, Based on Enterprise Management Solution
 
 

Centro Clínico Gaúcho’s Call Center Eliminates Missed Calls Now That Patients Use Online Scheduling, Based on Enterprise Management Solution

  • Oracle Customer:  Centro Clínico Gaúcho
    Location:  Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
    Industry:  Healthcare
    Employees:  2,000
    Annual Revenue:  $100 to $500 Million

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Founded in 1991 in the city of Canoas (Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil), the Gaucho Clinical Center (known also as Centro Clínico Gaúcho or GCC) provides medical, outpatient, hospital, occupational, and dental care at 23 service locations. In addition, the network’s 230,000 members have access to a network of services, laboratories, medical tests, and exams, such as radiology, ecography, physical therapy, magnetic resonance, and computerized tomography, as well as emergency rooms and hospitals throughout the entire Porto Alegre metropolitan region.

Every month, the center opens appointments for medical consultations and laboratory tests and receives nearly 120,000 calls. In the past, the center’s average wait time was long, and it missed 30% of its calls. To streamline its call center processes and provide better patient care, GCC created an electronic medical records system and online medical appointment scheduling system using Oracle Database, Standard Edition 11g. With the solution in place, the company experienced a 25% drop in the number of calls it received. At the same time, the healthcare organization has increased customer satisfaction among its current 30,000 registered users regarding its online appointment scheduling service and has reduced costs by eliminating the need to use paper for various transactions.

Using Oracle Database, Standard Edition 11g with Real Application Clusters, GCC strengthened its IT infrastructure to ensure high availability and data security. The tools guarantee data integrity and application-processing continuity, ultimately enabling the center to avoid interruptions. The center also uses Oracle Enterprise Manager—available in Oracle Database, Standard Edition 11g—which enables it to monitor and administer its databases simultaneously to avoid service interruptions.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Centro Clínico Gaúcho

  • “Thanks to our new Oracle infrastructure and our new corporate Website, we can be regional pioneers with our new appointment-scheduling service. Aside from relieving our call center, this initiative is enabling us to reduce our call center’s current infrastructure costs by 70%.” – Rogério Rodrigues de Cunha, IT Manager, Centro Clínico Gaúcho

  • Relieve the health center’s call center, which became overloaded at peak times and consequently missed 30% of its calls, to enable it to provide optimal service to patients
  • Reduce expenses related to the health center’s customer-service structure by offering users expanded online services, such as medical appointment preview and scheduling
  • Revamp the company’s IT environment and Website to make new services, such as electronic appointments, available to beneficiaries
  • Monitor and control patient data that affects the business of the medical, outpatient, hospital, occupational, and dental care provider

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle Database, Standard Edition 11g, which, as part of the new Website’s infrastructure, enabled GCC members to schedule appointments and consult medical records online
  • Guaranteed high availability for the online appointment scheduling system during periods when the GCC call volume increases—which happens every 15 days when new schedules begin
  • Rolled out Oracle Enterprise Manager—a tool that automates system management and ensures high system performance, which is essential for a healthcare business that needs to operate 24/7
  • Improved customer service by reducing wait times for telephone consultations—gaining the ability to now take the 30% of the calls that the organization had previously missed during peak periods
  • Freed up call center staff to respond to calls that require more personalization, focusing efforts on selling health plans, optimizing resources, and expanding the medical center’s presence in the region’s health market
  • Expanded the data center’s architecture by acquiring new servers and began to use four environments—development, projects, approval, and production—using Oracle Database, Standard Edition 11g with Real Application Clusters to avoid downtime and, if necessary, to redistribute the processing load between them

Why Oracle

“As our company grew, we knew we needed to modernize our IT environment. Oracle Real Application Clusters offered us an excellent cost-benefit ratio and gave us peace of mind in managing our critical applications in a manner that is transparent to end users. The healthcare market is a very demanding sector that requires quick responses. We have total confidence in Oracle’s tools to support our business in all stages of growth,” said Rogério Rodrigues da Cunha, IT manager, Centro Clínico Gaúcho.

Implementation Process

“Our implementation was complex and high-risk. However, everything went according to plan, and, working with Advanced IT, we managed the project very well—prioritizing security, minimizing risks, and always confirming each step with our end users,” Rodrigues da Cunha said.

Partner

“Advanced IT helped us to scale the needs at each step of our project with professionalism and commitment. It is a company of very responsible professionals who are specialists in the Oracle technology we implemented. We were satisfied and felt very secure in carrying out this project with them,” Rodrigues da Cunha said.

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