Essen ensures effective care for 57,000+ patients

Essen Health Care has over 200 practitioners operating across five divisions and serves close to 50,000 patients annually. With 17 years of experience caring for medically underserved communities in the Bronx, New York, its mission is to provide patient-centered, compassionate care. Through partnerships with innovative, world-class technology and service providers, Essen uses high-quality delivery models to manage population health at costs that remain effective and flexible. As part of its care network, Essen executives ensure leading-edge information technology is a cornerstone of its growth strategy.

To support the growing company, Essen turned to Masergy to replace their legacy PBX communications system with cloud-based unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution complete with Cloud Contact Center. Masergy’s UCaaS solutions offer more flexibility than Essen’s outdated PBX and have the enterprise-grade call routing and comprehensive management capabilities that some of the largest U.S. medical organizations struggle to bring to their patient interactions.

With the clear vision to rapidly grow their business, Essen began focusing on developing operational visibility and efficiencies within their call center, which would become a vital support arm for their growth plan. Visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) such as call volume, number of calls answered, call handling duration, time to resolution, and disposition codes that quantify the nature of the call, provide the critical data to efficiently staff and manage the contact center. Efficient operation means keeping costs under control and providing superior patient experiences while also meeting and exceeding service level standards.

Recognized results

• Enhanced patient experience
• Increased scalability for seamless growth
• Simplified cloud migration
• Accelerated digital transformation
• Increased network reliability/visibility

Solution: UCaaS and contact center implementation

To support continued growth, Essen had Masergy deploy a Cisco-based UCaaS and Webex Contact Center solution. Essen Health Care first utilized Masergy UCaaS and Contact Center solutions in its in-house call division, which today aids about 7,000 homebound and elderly patients. Up to 80% of patient interactions occur via phone as they report health issues and make requests.

Since this customer base is heavily reliant on telephonic support, there is an additional challenge for agents to reach patients and schedule follow-ups in a way that is efficient. “With many patients covered by Medicare or Medicaid, and because the patient experience is measured and used in Value-Based Purchasing (pay-forperformance) initiatives, it’s critical that the phone service is of the highest quality possible,” said Dr. Sumir Sahgal, Founder and Chief Medical Officer of New York-based Essen Medical.

With Masergy technologies at the core of their operations, Essen gained visibility into their KPIs that drove operational efficiencies for managing patient care while achieving targeted financial results, customer retention, satisfaction and regulatory standards.

Results: actionable insights and scalability for rapid growth

Masergy’s centralized call support system has made it easier and more efficient for Essen to manage and monitor House Call agents and the service they provide. Strong reporting capabilities provide Essen call center managers with the data they need to forecast demand and make decisions about agent staffing, patient needs, and market trends. These operational benefits position Essen at “a high level to strategically move in the right direction for growth,” said Dr. Sahgal.

Given the proven performance in the House Call division pilot program, Essen implemented Masergy’s solution in its Office division call center, where 70 U.S.-based agents regularly interact with over 200 providers and close to 50,000 patients across all New York boroughs. With the transparency and scalability of a centralized system, Essen has been able to ensure ongoing and effective patient care across its biggest divisions.

Based on improvements over the last three years, Essen set a new goal to double its business over the next three years, supporting 100,000 patients across its House Call, Office, Nursing Home, Urgent Care, and Care Management divisions.

The UCaaS Analyst feature provides a KPI dashboard, helping managers turn performance metrics into actionable insights that optimize service. Managers review these throughout the day to improve Essen’s ability to meet service requirements.

Essen also enjoys the “five-star” scalability and portability of the Masergy technology, which further supports the company’s aggressive growth. Essen opens new locations on a monthly basis and occasionally needs to shift staff to support new sites.

Provisioning new sites as easy. “Employees just take their phone, plug it into the network jack at the new site and are ready to go,” Sahgal said. The reliability is exceptional. In fact, people take it for granted, “which is when you know that the technology works,” he said.