When it comes to your nurse advice line, it’s imperative to consistently collect, analyze and monitor key performance metrics to know whether you’re meeting your goals, such as reducing avoidable ER visits and hospital readmissions, increasing enrollment in case or disease management programs, improving member satisfaction and clinical outcomes, cutting costs — or all of the above.
The best metrics are those that are informative, consistent, measurable and actionable. The information collected via your nurse triage program should offer valuable insight into your population’s needs, wants, concerns and satisfaction level.
It should also provide the actionable data you need to identify trends and gaps in service delivery and care, so informed decisions and necessary adjustments can be made and problems can be remedied before they escalate.
Setting up your initial performance tracking with your objectives clearly outlined will ensure you get the essential data you need to know what’s working, what’s not, and what actions may be needed to move you closer to your goals.
Nurse Advice Line Reporting Criteria
For successful assessment, the reports your nurse line provider generates should adhere to the following criteria:
- Simple and straightforward — overly complex and/or lengthy reports can make data analysis and maintenance overwhelming and onerous, leading to frustration and disengagement
- Comprehensive, yet focused on the key data points that are in alignment with your strategic initiatives and ROI goals
- Conveniently accessible whether via an online dashboard offering centralized access to the most current metrics or regularly scheduled emails to key stakeholders
- User-friendly; in an easy-to-understand format
- Consistently delivered based on a predetermined frequency schedule, such as daily, weekly or monthly — or accessible in real-time
- Customizable to your organization’s unique preferences, needs and goals
- Easily modifiable as policies, program initiatives and membership needs change
Nurse Advice Line Performance Metrics
In addition to overall service performance, following are examples of the metrics your nurse line vendor should be able to provide to demonstrate and evaluate performance:
- Service utilization
- Call volumes
- Call abandonment rate
- Average speed to answer
- Average callback time
- Guidelines used during triage calls
- Dispositions used during triage calls
- Disposition versus member’s original inclination
- Service usage by demographic (e.g., age, gender, zip code, etc.)
- Service referral source (e.g., doctor, direct mail, health plan website, etc.)
- Referrals to all health and wellness solutions as well as external resources
- Repeat and frequent callers
- Call volumes by day, week, month and year
- Potential cost savings and ROI
- Voice of the member feedback captured via post-call surveys
Diligently tracking your nurse line’s performance and acting on the intelligence provided will ensure that you’re getting the most out of your investment and that your members are getting the care they need to thrive.
Contact us if we can help your organization optimize your nurse advice line performance.
