Healthcare professionals find it difficult to understand the relevance to their world of my research on call centers: indeed, these operations are vastly different in level of risk (no one dies in call centers), training (doctors vs. telephone agents), technology (operating room vs. phone), economics ($100K’s per patient in neonatal ICU vs. a phone call), time-scales (customers “fly” through a call center in minutes) and much more.
But these worlds share significant operational commonalities, and thus call centers, if properly viewed, could become valuable for understanding hospital operations. The analogy I take is that of fruit flies serving as model organisms for humans, thus helping understand human processes and disorders. See at least the beginning of
then also (responding to the skeptic)
which led to
For concreteness, take the analogy of Call Centers to Emergency Departments: it starts with call centers serving as the main contact point with customers (patients), then they are challenged with random arrivals, skills-based routing (triage and patient flow), customer impatience (LWBS, LAMA), data processing and analysis, first-time-resolution vs. redials (early discharge vs. readdmissions), and much more.
Finally, recall the class-presentation about call centers and emergency departments, both serving as a hub for multi-disciplinary research and practice of Service Engineering; and that only the Faculty of IE&M fuses most of the relevant disciplines under a single educational-roof.
