This year, Healthcare Contact Center Times is launching its first-ever HCCT Awards. The awards represent an acknowledgment that people leading healthcare contact centers are doing some of the most important and underrecognized work in healthcare. We believe organizations doing it exceptionally well deserve to be recognized.

HCCT received submissions from across the country. The nominations were evaluated across three categories: Excellence, Culture and Innovation. The winners be honored in-person honored in-person at our annual conference in Atlanta, June 3-5. 

We received submissions from across the country. We evaluated them across three categories: Excellence, Culture and Innovation. They’ll be honored in-person at our annual conference in Atlanta, June 3-5. 

The Innovation Award (Greater Than 50 Agents) recognizes a team or initiative that has introduced a creative solution or technology that meaningfully improved processes, efficiency or patient outcomes. This year’s winner is Mayo Clinic.

Mayo Clinic’s Primary Care Access Operations team inherited a fragmented system: four separate call centers, wait times ranging from immediate to 30 minutes and staff who couldn’t cross-support when demand spiked. Their solution was the First In, First Out (FIFO) Call Center Project. This consolidated all four into one unified, cross-trained operation.

By updating Epic EHR decision trees alongside the consolidation, they created a workforce capable of scheduling across all primary care locations. Service level jumped from 66% to 77%. Average Speed to Answer dropped from 64 seconds to 31. Abandonment rate fell from 5% to 3%. And the team reduced their permanent FTE need by 1.6 positions, redeploying five supplemental schedulers to departments with greater need, all within three months of go-live.

“Mayo Clinic took a disjointed system and made it work the way patients always assumed it did,” says Derek Lok, publisher of Healthcare Contact Center Times. “The FIFO project is a great example of what happens when a team is given the clarity of purpose and the operational freedom to make changes.”