Sun River Health
New York’s largest federally qualified health center saves $350,000 a year with RingCentral
$350,000
ANNUAL SAVINGS SINCE IMPLEMENTING RINGCENTRAL COMPANY-WIDE
2,000
EMPLOYEES ACROSS DOZENS OF LOCATIONS NOW UNIFIED ON ONE TELEPHONY PLATFORM
97%
OF PATIENT CALLS ANSWERED LIVE WITH RINGCENTRAL CONTACT CENTER
Our telephony system represents the lifeblood of our operation. It was so important to find a phone solution with just the right mix of functionality and flexibility—to help us cut down wait times, increase our agents’ efficiency, and better serve our patients. RingCentral helped us achieve all these goals, all while saving us $350,000 a year.
Eric Brosius
Vice President of Technology Services
New York’s largest federally qualified health center
For many people in underprivileged communities, high-quality healthcare has historically remained out of reach. The organization now known as Sun River Health was founded nearly half a century ago to help change that.
From a single facility committed to providing quality, affordable medical care to the patients who needed it most, Sun River Health has grown to become the largest federally qualified health center in New York and the fourth largest in the United States.
The organization cares for more than 245,000 patients each year, providing a wide range of healthcare services at 40 clinical sites in New York City, Hudson Valley, and Long Island. Sun River Health also continues to deliver on its original mission—to increase access to comprehensive healthcare for vulnerable communities by providing care regardless of a patient’s income or insurance status.
INDUSTRY
Healthcare
HQ
Peekskill, NY
YEAR FOUNDED
1975
EMPLOYEES
2,000
A merger accelerated the need for a single telephony environment
Eric Brosius, Vice President of Technology Services, explains that Sun River Health is the result of a 2018 merger between two of New York’s leading healthcare providers: Hudson River Health Care and Brightpoint Health.
And while the merger created an organization with an even wider range of services and greater geographical reach to serve underprivileged communities, Eric notes that it exacerbated an internal challenge both organizations were already experiencing with their telephony environments.
“Each organization had a different set of limitations with their phone systems,” Eric explains. “One was struggling with an on-prem platform that couldn’t deliver the reporting the team needed, and that system’s admin environment was so convoluted that it required third-party help for even minor adjustments. The other company had a small cloud phone solution, run by a local vendor, but it had limited scalability that was being taxed even before the merger.”
The new Sun River Health organization needed a single cloud-communications environment to unite all 2,000 employees distributed across the company’s 40 clinical sites and seven administrative offices, as well as to support employees who traveled frequently among sites or worked from home.
As Eric explains, his team vetted many providers, evaluating them on several key criteria, and the decision quickly became obvious.
We put together an extensive list of must-haves for a company-wide communications solution: reporting and analytics, contact center functionality, cost, mobility, security, the company’s reputation for support, etc. When we evaluated all the vendors against these criteria, RingCentral was the clear winner.
Eric Brosius
Vice President of Technology Services
RingCentral Contact Center improves operations and the patient experience
Diana Velez, Director of Sun River Health’s Patient Care Contact Center, oversees two teams of support agents: patient care advisors, who field patient calls, and billing agents. In total, the organization’s contact center operation receives more than 20,000 calls every week.
As Diana explains, implementing RingCentral Contact Center has helped her team—and the organization’s patients—in several ways.
“RingCentral Contact Center’s functionality allows us both to streamline the patient experience and make our agents more efficient. For example, our automated menu now invites callers to request a text link to our patient portal, where they can receive lab results or communicate directly with their provider. Callers used to wait to speak with a live agent for those inquiries, but now we’re turning them into self-serve experiences, which benefits everyone.”
Carlos Ortiz, Senior Vice President of Operations, adds that he has seen a direct correlation between Sun River Health’s implementation of RingCentral and improved feedback from patients. “Based on patients’ feedback in terms of the ease of use of the system and being able to reach the right people more quickly, I can tell you that RingCentral Contact Center has had a quantifiable improvement on our patient satisfaction scores.”
Another feature the contact center team is leveraging to improve the patient experience and the department’s efficiency, Diana notes, is the callback option. “When there are long wait times, a patient can hang up, keep their place in the queue, and wait for a return call from one of our patient care advisors. That’s another way we’re using RingCentral Contact Center to streamline our own operations and also create a better experience for our patients.”
One of the most significant improvements we’ve seen since rolling out RingCentral Contact Center is our agents’ answer rate. Thanks to the reporting that lets us analyze call data, and the Workforce Management tools that let us move agents around to meet high-volume times, we’ve improved our answer rate from 75% to 97%—which is a real achievement considering we receive tens of thousands of calls a week.
Diana Velez
Director of Sun River Health’s Patient Care Contact Center
Unleashing more workflow improvements with RingCentral
These quantitative performance improvements of Sun River Health’s Patient Care Contact Center are all the more impressive considering that the entire department is now remote. Carlos explains that RingCentral Contact Center’s reporting dashboard, Quality Management platform, and other tools give the department’s managers more visibility into agent performance than when they had when everyone was in an office.
“Diana’s team can monitor how agents are performing on a very granular level even though everyone is at home,” Carlos says. “With RingCentral Contact Center, our managers can now see everything: how many calls an agent is making per day, how long patients wait on hold, when agents are logged in, etc. They can also use the call recordings and Quality Management tools to review how agents handle calls and use that information for training and coaching.”
Patrick Thompson, Director of Telecommunications and Special Projects, adds that RingCentral’s mobility is making it easier than ever for employees to stay connected working remotely or traveling.
“In the early pandemic days, before we rolled out RingCentral to all our staff, employees had to connect remotely to our network, which created a lot of challenges. With RingCentral on everyone’s laptops and cell phones, they can be anywhere and communicate using their business number. We’re now much more flexible as a company than we ever were.”
After the merger, we had two phone systems that didn’t communicate, which made it difficult to connect across the company and even between elements of our contact center department. What RingCentral has done for us is bring our whole 2,000-employee, 50-location organization together on one communication platform. And now we’re truly functioning seamlessly as one team.
Carlos Ortiz
Senior Vice President of Operations