Highlights:
- Integrating: By using the RingCentral Fax API to pull faxes digitally into its patient case management system, Senderra’s staff saves enormous amounts of time every day.
- Informing: Using RingCentral’s SMS API to automatically send patients updates on the status of their prescriptions, the company is improving the patient experience.
- Collaborating: With the unified RingCentral MVP app on employees’ computers, Senderra kept its staff connected and serving patients through COVID.
A patient-first pharmacy trusted by 20,000 physicians across the US
Although the company launched only a decade ago, Senderra RX has become one of the largest independent specialty pharmacies in the US. Every year, thousands of physicians who specialize in serious illnesses refer more than 100,000 patients to Senderra for prescriptions, counsel, and expert guidance on how to administer these often-complex treatments.
One key to Senderra’s growth has been building technology that connects providers, insurers, and patients, and makes the prescription process easier and more cost-effective for everyone. When the company wanted to improve workflows in its proprietary patient case-management system—CarePath—Senderra turned to RingCentral’s Developer Platform with open APIs.
Using RingCentral’s Fax API to streamline prescription processing
Every day, Senderra receives roughly 1,200 prescriptions by fax from doctors across the country. To begin processing these prescriptions, the company first needs to bring them into
CarePath environment. Nancy Crowell, Senderra’s Senior Vice President of Operations, explains that this used to involve a slow and labor-insensitive process.
“With our old system, [processing a faxed prescription] meant manually pulling a fax off the machine, parsing it if it covered more than one patient, and then scanning and uploading the pages into our CarePath system.”
When Senderra partnered with RingCentral, the company ported all its fax lines to digital lines within the RingCentral cloud communications environment. Then the operations team brought those faxes straight into CarePath using the RingCentral Fax API. That integration proved to be a game-changer, explains Nicholas Black, Vice President of Finance.
“Every faxed prescription comes straight into the RingCentral system, where we can digitally parse documents, tag them with patient IDs, and automatically pull them into our CarePath platform. That’s 1,200 fewer paper faxes a day we’re dealing with. No more waiting at a fax machine. No more manual scanning and uploading. It’s saving our teams enormous amounts of time.”
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Creating more timely patient communications with RingCentral’s SMS API
While the RingCentral Fax API helps Senderra pull inbound provider communications into its CarePath platform, the company is also using RingCentral’s SMS API to automate high-volume outbound communications—specifically, prescription updates to patients.
As Nicholas explains, “If the CarePath system indicates it’s time for a refill, that now triggers an automated SMS text message to let the patient know. We’ve built more than a dozen triggers like this, which means we’re providing our patients with more timely information and, ultimately, better service. Plus, given that we’re sending 10,000 of these SMS messages a day, that’s also saving our team tremendous time on manual follow-ups.”
Improving customer support with RingCentral’s cloud phone solution
Susan McCallum, Senderra’s Director of IT, also notes that the company’s call center team—distributed across several locations, and 100% remote during the quarantines—uses RingCentral’s cloud phone solution to enhance its service to the thousands of patients who call the company’s support lines every day.
“We’re using the RingCentral soft phone solution to run our entire, 100-agent call center department,” says Susan. “That operation is massive. Every month, our agents handle 135,000 inbound calls and make 40,000 calls to patients. But RingCentral is so intuitive and lets us set up call queues and move people between them so easily, we’re no longer having any issues handling that enormous call volume.”
Staying connected—and serving patients—through the lockdowns
In addition to the various ways Senderra has leveraged RingCentral to improve communications with both its healthcare partners and patients, the company has also found ways to improve its internal operations using the unified RingCentral MVP (Message, Video, Phone) platform.
“If I have a quick question that doesn’t warrant the full interruption of a phone call, I’ll use the Team Messaging tool. If I want a face-to-face chat, I’ll set up a RingCentral Video. Before COVID, we didn’t have much of a remote-work culture at Senderra. But thanks in large part to RingCentral, the transition was easy—and we were able to continue serving patients immediately.”
Nancy adds: “The pandemic was a frightening time for our patients, who suffer from the types of illnesses that put them at higher risk from viruses like COVID. We really had to be there for them during this time. And because we already had RingCentral across the company, we were able to do just that.”
Originally published Sep 23, 2021