Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. -- About half a year after Naval Health Clinic Quantico upgraded two of its most important customer-service systems at its clinic on the main side of Quantico, numbers show that the improvements have had a significant effect on customers’ experiences with the facility.
Upgrades to the queue-management system for the pharmacy and laboratory went into place at the end of last August, and a new phone system was installed for the Medical Home Port, Pediatrics and Deployment Health departments in November.
Both systems took some time to fine-tune, but now, the number of complaints about telephone access has dropped from 23 in the six-month period from April through September of last year to just three in the first five months of this year, said clinic spokeswoman Heidi Linscott.
Meanwhile, wait times at the pharmacy and lab have been cut nearly in half, from an average of 48 minutes in September of last year to a current average of 23 minutes.
Lt. Cmdr. Michael Mabry, department head at the pharmacy, said his customer-satisfaction numbers had hovered at about 75 percent for five years before the queue-management system was upgraded. Since then, they’ve jumped to 88 percent.
“It’s pretty awesome when you can make such a difference in six months,” he said.
However, he also credited a renovation completed last July, which reorganized the space and work flow more efficiently, and new software for the medicine-dispensing machine that arrived late last year. “We didn’t have enough automation for the number of technicians we had in the pharmacy,” Mabry said.
Meanwhile, the updated queue-management system, which includes a self-check-in kiosk, eliminated lines in the clinic by allowing customers to take a number, check the current wait time on a banner scrolling across the bottom of the television screen and either take a seat in the waiting room or opt to come back at a certain time to pick up their medication at the drive-through. The system now also prioritizes tickets, say for active duty service members or patients who had surgery that day, Mabry said.
It has also improved communication and accountability behind the scenes by connecting check-in to the dispensing and filling stations and by keeping records of all steps of the process, so that technicians no longer need to “run around asking who did what,” he said. “It’s very quiet now, compared to when I got here.”
In the future, Mabry said, he hopes to further improve operations by opening two more pharmacy windows, upgrading the medicine-dispensing machine and bringing more automation to the controlled-substances area, as well as getting the new phone system expanded to include the pharmacy.
“Our hope is that, eventually, we’ll have the whole clinic covered within the new phone system,” Linscott said, adding that it was installed first in the places that were having the most telephone issues, primarily where patients schedule appointments by phone.
There, the system “allows the clinic staff to better serve the patient’s appointing needs and significantly reduce patient hold times, dropped calls and busy signals,” Joey Sowell, the clinic’s chief information officer, wrote in an email. “The increased capacity of the call center is a great patient satisfier and provides the front door for patients seeking care.”
In addition to increasing capacity, the upgraded phone system allows the clinic to track the number of calls received, the number lost and how long hold times are, Linscott said.
She said customer satisfaction with phone access is up from 75 percent during the second half of last year to 84 percent for the period from December to the present.
The customer satisfaction numbers come from patient surveys, which, while they’ve been administered for years, patients are now able to take on the spot, thanks to kiosks that were set up in several locations at the clinic in early February.