Avita Care Solutions Entrusts
The national healthcare organization serving underserved and at-risk communities uses RingCentral to connect patients with their care teams and medications more quickly.
<5%
average call abandon rate across all locations nationwide since migrating to RingCentral
<1 week
to port phone numbers from old systems to the company’s centralized RingCentral environment
The phone capabilities we have now are amazing. We can seamlessly reroute calls wherever and whenever we need. Patients can request refills automatically, without speaking to a live agent. RingCentral is helping Avita maintain our status as a superior health services provider.
Marshall Frost
Vice President of Corporate Systems
Decades of experience caring for society’s most underserved populations
Often lost in the discussion about healthcare trends, costs, and regulations is the fact that some vulnerable patient populations — such as people living with or at heightened risk of HIV — have very limited options for receiving the care they need and deserve. Avita Care Solutions was founded to change that.
The result of a merger of five leading pharmacy companies across the United States, Avita Care Solutions (also called Avita Pharmacy) is a national healthcare services organization committed to providing highly competent, compassionate, and culturally sensitive care to the country’s most vulnerable and at-risk communities.
In addition to serving patients at its own retail pharmacies, Avita partners with hundreds of infectious disease clinics and other healthcare entities to provide a range of services — from onsite pharmacies to telehealth to care coordination. Helping to provide whole-person care for more than 145,000 patients each year, Avita is clearly succeeding at its mission of unlocking the full potential of healthcare for everyone.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
HQ
Plano, TX
YEAR FOUNDED
2018
EMPLOYEES
800
Merging five disparate phone systems
Marshall Frost, Avita’s Vice President of Corporate Systems, explains that two of the most challenging aspects of the company’s early operations were connecting employees across the country and providing a consistent phone experience for patients and healthcare partners.
“When these five pharmacy organizations merged to form Avita, each had its own phone system, and those systems’ technologies and capabilities varied wildly. Some required a lot of IT resources to maintain, and others couldn’t handle our growth strategies. And we were not providing the same level of service across the country.”
Marshall notes that one of the promises of a national organization like Avita is the ability to connect with patients anywhere and create an outstanding experience when they call. But, he adds, fulfilling that promise required a unified phone environment for the entire organization: pharmacies, call centers, corporate departments, and Avita’s brick-and-mortar care facilities.
Marshall’s team spoke with employees across Avita and the company’s partner organizations to learn what they wanted most in their phone system. Based on the most-cited answers in those conversations — ease of use and a dependable system and network — RingCentral proved the standout solution.
In all my years in IT, and all the system implementations I’ve been involved with, our RingCentral rollout was by far the smoothest I’ve ever experienced. The entire RingCentral implementation team — our project manager, the engineers, and the number-porting team — was outstanding, helpful, and really set Avita up for success.
Marshall Frost
Vice President of Corporate Systems
Improving the phone experience for employees and patients
After what Marshall describes as an unbelievably smooth and hassle-free migration of the entire organization onto the RingCentral platform, various departments began finding ways to use RingCentral to improve key workflows.
“Let’s say our care team in Texas is speaking with a patient in Arizona who needs a prescription filled. Because our entire organization is now unified in one phone environment, that Arizona-based pharmacy is an internal extension for us — which means our care team can easily dial them in for a three-way chat or transfer the patient in real time. That saves our care teams time and creates a much smoother phone experience for our patients.”
Another new efficiency Avita’s pharmacies have been able to create thanks to RingCentral is the option for patients to request a refill without speaking to a live agent. “We’ve connected our IVR to our dispensing system,” explains Marshall. “So the auto-attendant can give callers the option of pressing a number to request a refill. That’s a great example of reducing interruptions for employees at our pharmacy locations and improving the patient experience.”
One benefit that the company wasn’t even anticipating, Marshall adds, is the new level of business intelligence Avita’s managers can now use to continually improve operations.
One way our organization is benefitting from RingCentral — and this was actually a surprise — is with the enhanced visibility our managers receive from the reports and analytics. Because they have such insight now into call-volume patterns, for example, our managers can make sure their teams are staffed properly and that they’re using the right number of people at each time of day or day of the week.
Marshall Frost
Vice President of Corporate Systems
Meeting and exceeding insurers’ accreditation requirements
Finally, Marshall points out, RingCentral’s reporting capabilities are helping Avita ensure its continued good standing with its insurance company partners.
“Healthcare companies like ours need to maintain compliance with the quality-of-service requirements from insurers. With RingCentral, our team members responsible for reporting our ongoing compliance can easily generate reports that show, yes, our abandon rates are below a certain threshold, our patients don’t wait too long on hold, and other data points demonstrating we’re providing a high level of patient service.”
Since we’ve migrated to RingCentral, our average call-abandon rate across the company has dropped below 5%. And our Net Promoter Score, which I would’ve expected to experience at least a temporary drop as we switched to an entirely different phone system, has stayed exactly where it was. My team and I consider that a huge win and a great illustration of the ease of rolling out RingCentral.
Marshall Frost
Vice President of Corporate Systems