Improving Supply Chain Management at Quest Diagnostics Call Center

1 Summative Assessment: Supply Chain Management Renetta Roland University of Phoenix MHA/598 Thom Sloan 11/13/2023

2 Supply Change Quest Diagnostics Call Center United Healthcare Group is a healthcare and well-being company with two distinct and complementary businesses: Optum and UnitedHealthcare. The parent company oversees several smaller healthcare providers or partners, including WellMed, USMD, US Health, HealthMarkets, and Quest Diagnostics. All these companies operate under the big umbrella of United Healthcare Group and work together to care for 152 million people, sharing a vision of a value-based system that provides compassionate and equitable care ( Our Businesses: Innovating, collaborating, discovering, 2023). This paper focuses on the state of supply chain management and operations for the Quest Diagnostics call center. It demonstrates recommendations based on supply chain best practices to enhance its performance and opportunities for co-branding. The call center's supply chain significantly impacts customer service, affecting the accuracy of information provided to patients for their next care step. Adverse reports on post-call surveys can lead to a reduction in the call center's budget and fewer calls from patients, which could cause them to choose a competitor. United Healthcare Group purchased a new phone system called Five9 to prevent this. It helps reduce call abandon rates and keep company KPIs levels steady, ensuring a productive call center. This system is available for telecommuting, making it easy to keep the turnover rate down and open doors for IT to be available everywhere. With updated data and analytic capabilities, the company can make care more precise, effective, and equitable while eliminating noise from complicated systems, making it seamless for patients, insurance, and providers to connect.

3 Branding and Opportunity. United Healthcare’s Branding is easy to remember. There’s the Blue U on the left-hand side of the card, with Optum. It’s an orange card, which makes you think of an orange. The hard part of branding with these companies is when they partner up or buy out with smaller companies. This is where the rebranding opportunities become creative. The focal company is Quest Diagnostics, and the symbol is the Green Q with a half starburst on top of it. Before the call center was taken back, it was called Zotec. This company had little to no branding because another company outsourced it. Optum, known for RX coverage, bought it out and rebranded it with new technology, well-trained employees, and United Healthcare Group backing. They hired a new marketing manager, and he rebranded the company with his ideas and allowed them to either work from home or be in the office. Rebranding comes with a few challenges, and customers get a little confused. One of the challenges was billing, which was tough; under Zotec, it was one account number but several different bill numbers, so payments did not get posted on the correct bill, and payments got lost. During the transition from Zotec to Optum, the patient did online bill-pay, not realizing what was happening; payments were lost. The company had to do an extensive payment search and shut down the old address because Zotec was not transferring the money to Quest Diagnostics. The patient was affected. During the rebranding process, a year into the change, patients again started to trust the billing system. The company sent out letters advising the patients of our new billing system and offering more options to pay their bills. The other challenge is inputting the correct insurance information into the system. Each region has different lab codes. Lab codes communicate to the system which insurance company can be used, and sometimes, there’s a lot to choose from. With this glitch, the wrong lab code

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4 can be entered. And the insurance won’t get billed. I would recommend IT create a program to narrow the search down to help reduce the errors made by manually entering the lab codes. This will reduce the number of return calls with an ongoing issue. The goal is one and done, but it is hard to do when the patient calls back twice or thrice for the same problem. Also, I would recommend that all the floor representatives be trained in what to look for and make the corrections accordingly on the first call. This also helps reduce call waiting and holding time. It also offers customers the best customer service that they should deserve. Conclusion Supply chain management may greatly aid operational economics and effectiveness in the healthcare industry because it is a direct/indirect approach to financial and patient satisfaction overall. To help with the supply chain, the company must revisit a SWOT analysis to ensure it stays on target. Quest Diagnostic reviews it at least once every six months because that is when we do our Town Hall meetings and these meetings. These meetings give a projection of how well we have been doing, and they also show the direction that the company is going. The marketing department is doing a great job with advertising with Optum because we have more patients feeling good about the company, and they will continue to get lab work done at Quest Diagnostics. Branding is essential; catchy phrases, simple logos, and great location make a difference in what is next for the company. When your doctor says he needs a lab work-up on you, the first thing that comes to mind is Quest Diagnostics, The Q with the starburst over it, and the next thing that comes to mind is excellent customer service with little to no wait time. The company as a whole is leveraging its financial responsibility, and the call center turnover rate has dropped because of overall employee and patient satisfaction.

5 References Our Businesses: Innovating, collaborating, discovering. (2023). https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/people-and-businesses/ businesses.html .

WK6 Summative Assessment Supply Chain Management

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