NCR Healthcare Solutions

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NCR has recently appointed Warwick Lawson-Syer as its new Director for Emerging Industries in Europe, to develop and grow its self-service healthcare offerings throughout the continent.
 
In the healthcare industry, a positive approach to customer service is just as important as anywhere else. When visiting a doctor’s surgery, hospital or pharmacy, patients expect to be treated quickly, considerately and with discretion. Human interaction remains important in this intensely personal sector, but with ever-increasing demands on healthcare budgets placing pressure on staff and service levels, is it time for self-service to step in and lend a hand?
 
In the US, where healthcare is a business rather than a government- provided service, self-service has already been greeted with enthusiasm by healthcare institutions as a means of cutting costs and improving service. Newark Beth Israel Medical Center, an affiliate of the Saint Barnabas Health Care System, recently deployed self-service technology from NCR in its emergency department to help prioritise treatment based on medical urgency. The 673-bed Newark, N.J.-based regional teaching hospital is using NCR’s MediKiosk, a self-service check-in kiosk that helps hospital staff better manage patient flows by flagging the patient with the most immediate need. The system identifies the patients’ needs via a set of rules established by Newark Beth Israel Medical Centre and configurable via the central server.
 
Meanwhile, in Orange City, Florida Hospital Fish Memorial recently installed three self-service kiosks to help reduce patient waiting times in outpatient registration and surgical services. The hospital has already pledged to its emergency patients that they would be seen by a physician within an hour of check-in. Registrars are available to assist patients who wish to use the kiosks, or to those who choose to register face-to-face. “We see the kiosks as a way to reduce wait times, as patients can quickly check themselves in without having to wait for a registrar,” said Danny Dubosque, director of Patient Financial Services. “Additionally, the kiosks will help ensure a higher accuracy of patient data, as they have a chance to review and correct it right then and there.” Across the Pond
The US is clearly already responding well to self-service in healthcare – NCR currently has 120 US customers. Europe, however, is somewhat different and presents a new challenge for any business wanting to provide self-service solutions for healthcare. To begin with, unlike the US, Europe is not simply one single market – in fact, every country has a different system in place, so there is no one standard solution.
 
For instance, in the UK, treatment is free for the entire population, through the National Health Service (NHS), a government-funded public service. By comparison, in the Republic of Ireland, patients must pay a fee of between €20 and €30, which limits the number of people who come in with minor ailments. In Germany, health insurance is mandatory, and the new German e-health card, which is expected to come out in the next year, will be carried by every citizen and create a link between the health insurance company and the pharmacy or GP.
 
 
When expanding into a new sector such as healthcare, it is important not to disregard expertise learned from other sectors. NCR has recently appointed Warwick Lawson-Syer as its new Director for Emerging Industries in Europe to develop and grow its self-service healthcare offerings throughout the continent. NCR plans to focus on repurposing its current solutions from retail and banking and transposing them to healthcare, meaning that the company can provide a strong range of solutions for healthcare from the start.
 
For instance, data protection and confidentiality is absolutely essential for healthcare providers, since personal data such as patient records must be kept absolutely secure. However, NCR is able to draw on its expertise from existing solutions from banking, enabling it to provide the required support for secure transactions and data transfer. This means that for Germany, the progression from secure bank card transactions to secure e-health card transactions will become a very natural and intuitive ‘next step’, and in Ireland, the €20 payment can also be handled automatically by taking technology from NCR’s payment solutions and transferring it to the healthcare sector.
 
The common theme throughout these solutions, regardless of continent, lies in managing patient interaction through efficient time management. In the US, NCR MediKiosk improves productivity because the patient can use a kiosk to update his/her personal data and pre-process certain questions. This speeds up check-in times, reducing queues and the pressure on busy receptionists. It also means doctors need to spend less time ascertaining basic facts, freeing them up to focus more on helping the patient understand their condition and the action they need to take to reduce their symptoms and enables more patients to be seen.
 
NCR’s WayFinder solution can direct patients through hospitals and surgeries without difficulty and works especially well when combined with digital signage to direct patients to their destinations. Digital signage can also run content relevant to a particular group; for instance, if a surgery is holding a mother/toddler session, content can be shown which is relevant to toddler healthcare. Digital signage can help to provide links between the healthcare sector and the government, enabling government messages to be communicated to patients easily.
 
Mobile electronic ‘clipboards’ enable patients to fill in healthcare forms electronically while sitting in the waiting room. These are just some of the possibilities self-service can make available in healthcare today, and clearly all of these benefits translate directly to the UK and to other European healthcare services, as the objectives of the healthcare providers remain constant, whether privately or publically funded.
 
Of course, one of the most important, and in some respects, challenging areas in introducing self-service to the healthcare sector can be to encourage staff to engage with the new technology. It is therefore essential to emphasise the benefits available not only to patients but also to GPs, hospitals and other healthcare practitioners and institutes if self-service is really to be adopted into this sector.
 
Looking at the situation in the UK, a fund-holding GP is measured by a Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF), which is based on their level of care according to certain targets. For example, GPs are measured according to whether over-65s are administered a flu vaccination every year. So in this respect, a GP surgery is similar to a business, with targets to achieve in order to receive a good score which has a direct impact on the funding available to a given surgery. It is therefore important to identify the targets which healthcare providers have to meet, and, from that, to identify just how self-service can help to meet those targets.
 
NCR enables the GP to design business rules to capture these transactions. For example, if a 70-year old woman comes in to order a repeat prescription and uses a self-service kiosk to do so, the kiosk can simultaneously check whether or not she has had a flu jab this year. If not, it can prompt her to arrange one, and can even book her in on the spot to have it at that same day and even the same time. Such measures therefore improve a healthcare provider’s ability to meet its NHS targets.
Long-Term Prognosis

The essential point here is that the benefits of the self-service must align with the interests of the GP, and, ultimately, with the interests of the healthcare system in the country in question. For the NHS, the focus is now moving towards ‘anticipatory’ care, where people need to start taking some responsibility for their own health – including regular healthcare ‘MOTs’ for patients. Clearly, kiosks could help significantly with this.
 
As for clerical staff, NCR’s Warwick Lawson-Syer reports an excellent response to the concept so far, pointing out that many people choose to get into healthcare as a vocation and want to interact with people. Too often they can end up swamped with paperwork and time they spend interacting with patients – not to mention the quality of those interactions – drops significantly. The use of self-service kiosks means that clerical staff can reduce their paperwork dramatically, and actually look at, talk to and engage with patients.
 
Self-service has become a familiar sight in several other vertical markets now, including retail, banking and travel. We are all reasonably aware of the options to check-out our own shopping at the supermarket, to deposit or withdraw money using an ATM, or to check-in automatically at the airport using a check-in kiosk. Healthcare seems to be a logical extension of these pre-existing solutions, where many of the concepts already in use in other sectors can be adapted and integrated into the healthcare sector with great success.