Intellicare: Managing Patient Relationships Through Learning

It would be something if every enterprise had a staff of well-seasoned agents to give customers advice and keep them healthy. Even better, what if your enterprise was made up of a staff of trained agents–nurses–whose job is to keep patients healthy? Intellicare dispenses medical call-center services, including physician referral, class registration and disease management programs. Some 75 percent of the company’s workforce operates from home, and e-learning and virtual collaboration technology have enabled Intellicare to train and monitor a staff of 300 qualified nurses who manage patient relationships.

Intellicare has enjoyed rapid growth and moved away from traditional office buildings to house their business. The company’s three business units–providers, payers and disease management–have embraced online learning to certify nurses in critical job skills and knowledge. Intellicare deploys a remote network for its geographically dispersed staff from Maine to California, which means nurses can work from home on PCs the company has set up.

“We started this about a year and a half ago,” said Angela Keith, technology communications manager and nurse for Intellicare. “So, in about 18 months we’ve deployed 58 courses. It’s been very rapid development, everything from a one-page read to full, rich media with audio, video, animation. It’s very robust. We’re doing blended learning, so no one’s just learning from the CBT (computer-based training) the Learning Space. We also have follow-up sessions, and there’s constant updating and on-the-spot training that our staff do with their lead nurses through the IM (instant messaging) mechanism. It’s constant learning and updating of what we already know.”

Intellicare considers its call-center activities a strategic business asset, and those activities’ impacts on the business’ bottom line equals rapid growth, as well as lower costs. “We’re not building brick-and-mortar offices all over, and we don’t need to fly trainers out,” Keith said. That means no budget is needed for transportation or renting classroom space. Some of the nurses on staff don’t even have a physical office to go to; operations are completely online. “We really couldn’t operate any other way,” Keith explained.