How Proliance Surgeons keeps 80+ care centers connected with Dialpad Support

When you’re running one of the largest surgical practices in the country, you’ve got a lot of care centers to keep connected and a lot of patients to keep connected with physicians.

To do that, you need a good communications platform. While Proliance Surgeons specializes in everything from orthopedics to reconstructive surgery, CIO Curt Kwak had his hands full creating their IT roadmap and keeping over 80 care centers up and running.

With so many care centers spread across just as many locations, Proliance patients would get a very different communications experience depending on which one they called. A big reason for this was that not every care center used the same technology or tools, making it hard to provide a consistent level of quality.

So, Curt looked for a better way to keep physicians, patients, and centers all connected, with high-quality service across locations.

Reducing telecom expenses, enterprise-wide, by over $40,000 annually

Physicians at Proliance Surgeons spend a lot of time collaborating, whether they’re sharing key medical information while transferring patients or connecting with a colleague for a consultation. So the last thing they need is to have to switch between multiple apps and devices every time they need to reach out to someone. Because of this, Curt knew they needed a single tool that could be used for all their communications, from anywhere.

That’s where Dialpad came in. With Dialpad, Curt and his team got a cloud-based communications platform that they can access from anywhere with an internet connection, on any device. They can make phone calls, message each other, and even have video meetings—all from a single desktop or mobile app. It’s all in one place, and no matter where they go or call, it’ll be the same high-quality experience:

And when they do need to set up a new care center, they can add a contact center team in Dialpad in literally minutes, and that’s including adding phone numbers and employees:

“Before Dialpad, we had a variety of technologies, some implemented without any consultation, so we didn't even know what some care centers were working with,” Curt reflects. “When we got our first care center on Dialpad, it opened up so many doors—even for simple things like being able to access voicemails remotely or the voicemail transcription services.”

“We reduced our telecom expense enterprise-wide by $40,400 per year,” says Curt.

Using AI to improve productivity and patient-doctor communication

There’s one other thing Dialpad brings to Proliance that no other provider they looked at could: artificial intelligence (AI).

Dialpad Ai does a few interesting things to help Proliance Surgeons’ team be more productive. For example, during each call, it can automatically transcribe the conversations in real-time and highlight action items, so physicians can go back and check the call transcripts quickly to find all the information they need:

Transcriptions also help physicians coordinate care for their patients. “Information from call transcriptions are shared between physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners,” says Curt.

Dialpad Ai doesn’t just transcribe calls—it transcribes voicemail messages too, which improves patient-doctor communication and saves Proliance Surgeons’ team about four minutes per call. Doctors are often in surgery when patients call. Before, a nurse or medical assistant would need to listen to the entire (sometimes very long) voicemail, while trying to write detailed notes for the doctor.

“Now, they can just look up the transcription in Dialpad and scan it quickly to know how to respond to the patient,” says Curt. “This saves us up to 30 minutes a day, just from not having to listen to voicemails.”

Proliance also uses voicemail transcriptions for error checks, something they could never do before. “Sometimes, we need legal documentation for worst-case scenarios with patients,” Curt says. “Voicemail transcriptions are a huge part of these error checks.”

These days, even visits to the doctor can be done remotely. For patients in rural areas where technology is limited, getting medical care remotely is a game-changer. “A lot of our patients are in rural areas, where they only have a phone to call us from,” says Curt. “Dialpad’s voice solution is very important to us in those areas.”

A better patient and telemedicine experience

Even though sometimes patients still need to come in physically for surgical consults or diagnosing injuries, Proliance Surgeons’ team can use Dialpad for all their appointments that can be done over video calls.

And when patients do call in (whether they use voice or video), the calls go much more smoothly than they used to before Dialpad. “One of the biggest benefits for us in IT is reducing telecom-related trouble tickets by at least 35 to 40%—all gone,” Curt says.

With call routing, patients get faster customer service by navigating through Proliance’s phone menus more quickly. “Patients can get to an agent faster and even if our team is busy, and we can call patients back more quickly, because physicians can do that anytime, from anywhere,” says Curt. “This has improved their sense of confidence and satisfaction with us.”

To improve the patient experience even further, Dialpad Ai can analyze the sentiment of a call in real time, which helps Proliance’s team quickly route distressed callers to get help from a subject matter expert right away. “When Dialpad Ai detects a distressed tone from a patient when they call, the call goes to a specialist or counselor who will be better equipped to help the patient,” says Curt:

Smarter staffing and budget decisions with contact center analytics

Although Proliance’s team tried to track their care centers’ performance before, they’ve never been able to measure it in real time. For most of their care center locations, tracking performance is still pretty new. With contact center dashboards, Proliance’s care centers are learning to become more data-focused by making smarter, data-based decisions.

“For the last nine years, some locations were doing it manually or not at all. Now, we’re noticing that care centers are making smarter decisions, like how many more people they need to equip their contact centers with and what kind of skill sets they will need moving forward,” says Curt. “We’re no longer making decisions based on subjective reasons. Care centers can use actual metrics to get their supervisors’ support in making staffing and budget decisions.”

The best part? Care centers can pull their own reports now. “Before, our locations had to call us constantly to ask for reports. Now, they just pull it themselves,” says Curt. “This empowers them to analyze and improve their performance.”

Staying HIPAA-compliant

With all the medical information that gets passed around, security is of the utmost importance for healthcare organizations like Proliance. Fortunately, Dialpad helps them maintain HIPAA compliance, so healthcare professionals can use it without worry. (Dialpad is also SOC2 Type II compliant and is a member of the Cloud Security Alliance Security, Trust, and Assurance Registry.)

“Our physicians know that their confidential data is secure and protected from things like ransomware. And if we have a disaster, they know that data is available so their work will be uninterrupted,” says Curt.

Looking ahead: Bringing AI to all contact centers

Securely connecting 80 care centers isn’t an easy task, but Curt and his team at Proliance Surgeons, armed with Dialpad, were up to the challenge. Now Proliance has all their care centers on a single communications platform, saves money each month, and more importantly, can provide an excellent patient experience, no matter where they’re working from.

What’s next? Proliance is looking to increase Dialpad Ai adoption across all their contact centers, in addition to implementing more integrations with their existing tech stack, like Dialpad + Microsoft Teams. We can’t wait to see how they take advantage of more Dialpad features to provide an even better patient experience!