PCFA’s team of nearly 100 specialist nurses provide invaluable support, advice and information to men affected by prostate cancer and their families. Their new Specialist Telenursing Service is accessible from anywhere Australia, allowing all those impacted to connect easily with a specialist telenurse via phone or email.
AlphaSys has worked with PCFA to implement a new customer relationship management (CRM) and call management system so that the telenursing team support callers and monitor trends in patient care and community awareness. It’s a solution the team describes as “game-changing.”
Problem
PCFA is Australia’s leading community-based organisation for prostate cancer research, awareness, and support. The organisation supports thousands of men and families each year, striving to improve survivorship outcomes and quality of life for all those impacted by the disease.
Each year the organisation distributes around 20,000 survivorship kits to men and the community, supports around 12,000 patients through its Prostate Cancer Specialist Nursing Service, and connects around 6,000 members of an Online Community dedicated to improving understanding of this complex disease.
In 2020, PCFA held a major fundraising appeal to establish a new nationwide Prostate Cancer Specialist Telenursing Service, so that help for men and the community would be just a phone call away.
PCFA’s project plan involved integrating an existing 1800 number with the new service, and they needed to consider the full range of options to ensure the service would be impactful, effective, and cost-efficient for the thousands of donors who gave generously to make it possible.
It became clear quickly to the project team that the service would not be efficient if the default call pathway involved taking a message, logging it in a spreadsheet, and queuing the caller for a callback from the telenursing team. The team knew this approach would place enormous pressure on all staff, and could exacerbate frustration and anxiety among distressed callers.
The team also knew that they’d get regular callers, people who had ongoing nursing concerns that required follow up advice and continuity, which meant they needed a record of each caller’s case history. With a basic call system, securely capturing this depth of data was not possible.
Of equal importance, most callers would require follow up care in the form of survivorship kits and information packs which PCFA sends by email or post. Without a more sophisticated system for managing callers, it was clear to the team that this would not be manageable with their existing infrastructure and administrative system.
COVID-19 had also increased the need for enhanced sophistication, with emails and calls to the organisation increasing significantly, both in volume and complexity. Australia-wide, men were upset that diagnostic services and treatment were being delayed, and PCFA’s specialist nurses on the ground were stretched, challenging the organisation to innovate to maintain and grow its support.
The team knew they had to find new solutions in order to save lives.
Solution
“We looked at different platforms and realised that Salesforce with the Natterbox plug-in did 90% of what we needed straight out of the box, with minimal requirements for customisation. It just WORKED and it was up and running in under six weeks, providing a depth of data and insights that will help us plan for the future of the service. What we’ve had delivered is exceptional. It has exceeded our expectations.”
Matthew Palmer, Nursing Program Administration Coordinator, PCFA
The PCFA team had already spent time considering their requirements and had confidence that a Salesforce solution would meet their needs. They sought AlphaSys as a delivery partner to leverage the AlphaSys team’s long experience in Salesforce NFP and understanding of the requirements of these type of call centres.
Importantly, AlphaSys were able to offer an AgilePM delivery approach which guaranteed PCFA a fixed price and delivery timeframe, ensuring cost-effectiveness and a timely return on the investment made by the organisation’s community supporters. The team knew they had to test and launch the system for a proposed launch date within a rapid turnaround time of six weeks, so a trusted and experienced delivery partner was essential.
The technical solution included a Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system integrated with a Natterbox call handling tool. During the project implementation, the team identified additional requirements and AlphaSys were able to adjust the project scope to include these, without increasing delivery time or budget. The solution has also provided room for future growth and enhancements as PCFA’s needs evolve.
The Salesforce platform allows the team to record data which can later be aggregated and anonymised for analysis. With a simple tick-box feature, each call can be tagged with up to 30 common topics, as well as basic information such as the callers location. This information can be analysed to enhance the service – for example, by creating additional resources to address the most common topics, or to lobby for additional funding in the states experiencing high volumes of calls.
The team have also developed a process that supports screening for distress in all callers, whereby the distress level of individual patients and callers can be recorded to help the organisation respond to community needs and monitor callers’ psychological wellbeing over time. The solution enables PCFA to observe how a caller’s distress level changes over multiple consultations, and allows for vital follow-up care and assistance when needed.
Outcome
“Without this solution, we would not have had the capability to capture any information about the client or to see what they called about before. Now, when a client calls more than once, our expert team can retrieve their case notes and the caller does not need to retell their story. This reduces the likelihood that the client will feel unheard and drained by the process, and enhances our prospects of supporting our clients to achieve measurable improvements in their distress levels and decision making.”
Bernie Riley, General Manager, Telenursing Services PCFA
Even before callers speak to a telenurse, the system delivers an improved experience for both callers and the admin team answering the phone. Administration staff can more quickly transfer the call to the telenursing team, without wasting time entering details into a time-consuming spreadsheet. Admin time can be reallocated to more beneficial tasks, saving on staff costs, and the admin team are no longer left feeling helpless and unable to effectively support distressed callers – they have the confidence that the telenursing team will be able to quickly pick up the call.
Among the many benefits provided by the solution, PCFA’s team can now offer each caller a more personalised quality of care and information, harnessing system templates to dispatch emails and resources quickly and efficiently so that men and the community don’t have to wait days for essential information about their concerns with prostate cancer.
The telenursing team also sees the benefits of the system beyond day-to-day call management. As qualified nurses with specialist training, the Salesforce tool is allowing them to transform their clinical knowledge into public health knowledge. The dashboard reporting functionality allows data analysis of call volumes, areas of concern, geographical location, and relationship to the disease, whether the caller is a patient, a partner, a family member, or a friend. In turn, PCFA is using this data to enhance and grow its support even further.
“The dashboards are brilliant – they allow us to prove the value of the service by demonstrating the difference we are making – the number of people we talk to each day and how the delivery of personalised care can improve their psychological wellbeing and decision making through treatment. The AlphaSys solution is helping us to improve outcomes and quality of life for many men and their loved ones, harnessing sophisticated technology to enhance Australian prostate cancer survivorship.”
Matthew Palmer, Nursing Program Administration Coordinator, PCFA