I’ve help set up health counseling hotlines supporting both Malaysia & Singapore for the following therapy areas:
- pneumococcal disease awareness
- weight loss management: diet, medication & exercise
- smoking cessation support
- cervical cancer awareness
Here are some learnings I thought I’d share.
My preference is for health counseling hotlines to be manned by senior semi-retired nurses. I try to recruit nurses who have had training in diet, nutrition and exercise plus those who have looked after a nursing team. I find these nurses have a better counseling manner, are able to develop a good counseling relationship with callers and their past experience enables them to handle difficult situations much better.
Some key areas / requirements:
- decide on the objective(s) of this counseling hotline and if any follow-up is needed to drive to a subsequent consumer action (leaflets sent to callers, etc)
- develop a call flow to help guide the teams towards certain call end-goals
- software that records all calls
- escalation procedure: for adverse events, complaints, situations requiring intervention by a qualified doctor or a senior company official
- process of tracking in-coming & out-going calls, call history, caller details and what was discussed (manual or automated*)
* A patient counseling or CRM system that tracks call history + areas the counselor discussed along with the ability to handle call-scheduling according to a call-process is preferred to manual tabulation. However if expected calls are less than 100 a month, a manual system is adequate.
All hotlines should have a call-script prepared with input from nurse counselors, potential callers /or patients and a qualified doctor or specialist. The call-script should try to cover as many areas as can be anticipated. This should then be approved by a qualified doctor or specialist from either the company commissioning the hotline or a professional medical association.
Following call-script approval, the recommendation is for the nurse counselors to be trained by a doctor or specialist in the disease area as well as other relevant areas like treatment, side-effects, follow-up procedures.
Areas not to be discussed should be agreed upon and highlighted to the counseling team. The team should also be made aware of incidents that require escalation and the procedure to follow.
I suggest for a weekly or fortnightly call report to be provided to the client initially. This can be moved to fortnightly or monthly after the first 45 days.
I like to listen in on a couple of conversations each week just to get a sense of what’s being counseled and speak to the counseling team to get feedback. Then I’d get the team to review the call-script or counseling format to see if adjustments are needed.
Subsequently, I would recommend a review of the hotline with the client every six months to evaluate performance, any learnings gathered and propose options to enhance the call-process to better meet the agreed objectives.
Hope the above helps.
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