Who are Medpages?
Medpages is the definitive source of healthcare provider contact information in Africa. Our quality database contains 500,000 actively managed records. Our data is used by a range of organisations in the healthcare industry such as medical insurance and pharma companies, who essentially outsource the management of their healthcare provider data to us. We are based in South Africa.
Challenges
Medpages had a tradition of not documenting processes and rules, and relying on ‘old timers’, who were the repositories of knowledge. Our call centre staff, who contact healthcare providers to update their details, had to rely on remembering a lot of details and asking the old timers to remind them. Staff were also sometimes given information in email announcements, which meant that they had to remember that they had been sent something in an email, and search for it there.
Solutions
Overcoming previous challenges
Elevio gave us an easy ‘repository’ for our knowledge base. But we still had to do the work of capturing all the knowledge in people’s heads. It was also quite a process to get consensus on processes and procedures - it turned out that people had different ideas about how data should be captured!
Staff now know that new processes and rules will be communicated to them through Elevio. Also, when they have to do a type of work they haven’t done in a while, they can use content on Elevio to remind them.
What we like most
It was easy to integrate Elevio into our online database management system that our call centre staff use to update healthcare provider data - all we had to do was include a bit of Javascript code in our templates. This means that staff have easy access to articles giving them content on how to capture data correctly and answer healthcare provider queries.
As a content manager, it was quick to learn how to use Elevio.
Elevio’s search function is very good, which helps users to find content quickly. We also monitor the failed searches and add keywords, even for misspelt words, to make content easier to find.
Elevio has easy to set up helper functionality, which we use to announce changes to processes and rules, and new articles. We use the pulsating red dot, viewable once per user, whenever there’s something new that needs to be announced:
The automatic weekly emails on usage stats are great - they give you a quick glance at how the knowledge base has been used for the past week. We find the empty searches particularly useful - we use them to add keywords to make content easier to find. For example, we add misspelt words as keywords.
Results
We have found that embedding Elevio in our data capture system and getting it used by our call centre agents has required a culture change - staff were not used to using a written knowledge base to help them to do their work. This is shifting, but it takes time! We have integrated Elevio use into our training for new call centre agents, and we hope that this will help new staff to get used to this new way of working.
