Assisted reproductive service provider Virtus Health is taking its customer relations management to the cloud, enhanced by AI. 

It has chosen American company RingCentral to deliver an integrated communications and contact centre solution across its 62 fertility clinics, day hospitals, and diagnostics centres worldwide, mostly in Australia. Featuring RingCentral MVP and Contact Centre, the solution will consolidate and combine Virtus' telephony and contact centre functionality and the ability to manage call flows and queues centrally.

Deployment, which began at its Complete Fertility Centre in Southampton in the United Kingdom, will be conducted systematically over Virtus' global SD-WAN in the next six months, based on a media release. It will also involve the integration of RingCentral for Salesforce, ensuring calls are routed to the appropriate clinics and teams while making patient information readily accessible. 

Responding to inquiries about the cybersecurity of its global implementation, RingCentral assured that at least for the Australia-wide deployments it has complied with Virtus' core requirements for service availability and reliability, as well as the security and privacy of patient data. "That data includes the content of calls, facsimiles, voicemails, voice recordings, shared files, conferences, webchat, email or other communications transmitted or stored through RingCentral services, with the data retained in Australia," it told Mobihealth News.

WHY IT MATTERS

Virtus will be leveraging RingCentral's platform to provide personalised patient care. It is said that enhancing healthcare communications with AI contributes to the improvement of patient experience at all levels. 

John Poli, Healthcare Principal at RingCentral explains: "In the lead up to a patient engagement, conversational AI will both guide the digital experience across multiple communications channels and also contextualise that engagement, as it understands the patient history from the EMRs and any other internal patient management systems. During the conversation with the patient services team or a care professional, RingCentral’s AI can monitor the conversation for sentiment analysis and augment the interaction through transcription services, script prompts, and other actions to enhance the patient experience. Post interactions, AI can provide an analysis of the call and the keywords between the patient and agent or care provider to assist in patient follow-up, staff training, and enhanced record keeping, with data potentially shared and integrated with the patient’s formal EMR."

"Reproductive healthcare, especially IVF, is a very personal journey and so patient experience is our most important outcome," Shaun Thurling, head of IT at Virtus Health, emphasised. He said they chose RingCentral's solution as it was found ideal for the seamless interconnection between its centralised contact centre and decentralised clinical environment. 

Virtus' five-year contract with RingCentral is also expected to draw in "significant" savings in business communications costs annually. 

THE LARGER TREND

RingCentral had similar deployments of its integrated communications and contact centre service solution in other Australian care settings over the past few years, including not-for-profit DPV Health with 18 sites in Melbourne and ASX-listed diagnostics chain Healius with 260 locations country-wide.