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Customer Care Solutions Center  supports Philips' entire medical technology portfolio

Philips Healthcare has just opened its Customer Care Solutions Center integrating more than 200 biomedical engineers and technicians, dozens of clinical staff, and state-of-the-art electronic connectivity to customers.

The Alpharetta, Georgia center includes a high bandwidth network that enables faster downloads of data and image information to speed resolution time and help keep hospital technology operational. On average, the center handles 2,500 inquiries a day; more than a third of those are able to be resolved remotely. The facility serves North America, South America and Latin America.

"Healthcare facilities are trying to improve their utilization on equipment, such as cardiac cath lab, and uptime becomes critical if they are going to meet the utilization target," said Erwin R. Thomas, Senior Director of the Philips Customer Care Solutions Center. "They want to know-- if I have a problem can you fix me remotely? What they are really asking is, do I need to reschedule my patients? Our goal is within 15 minutes to tell them if we can absolutely fix them and give them a time frame. Communication is the critical element."

The center supports Philips' entire medical technology portfolio including health informatics, PACS, CT, MRI, nuclear medicine, PET, x-ray, interventional, ultrasound, patient monitoring and cardiac care.

Service can be offered at a customer's request, but often the medical equipment itself sends an alert to the center and issues can be addressed or fixed remotely before the customer is even aware of a problem. Today's medical technology incorporates sophisticated self-diagnostics that track usage, anticipate problems, and identify trends in equipment functioning.

"We have 'phone home' capabilities on our machines, which are looking at key parameters in our system. If those parameters are not on track or are on the upper or lower specification limit, the machine will 'phone home.' It goes into our automatic customer interface device and routes that alert to the right engineer, technician or clinical specialist, depending on the modality," Thomas said. In this way, many problems can be averted before they manifest themselves through the anticipatory diagnostic capabilities of the equipment.

Other calls come in from people rather than machines if customers have a technical or clinical issue or question. Here again, remote diagnostics help inform the service plan.

"If we can resolve it remotely of course we do that. If we can't resolve it remotely, we diagnose it remotely, then order the parts so that the field engineer will go to one of our forward stocking locations, pick that part up, go to the customer site and fix it. Or they meet the part the next day if we have to ship it from our centralized shipping location," Thomas said.

The Philips hub also has simulator equipment up and running so that engineers can put their hands on the technology that the customer is using.

"A customer may call in an error message on their screen on a CT scanner and our engineer will go into the system remotely, be able to look at the error logs and diagnose it," Thomas said. He noted that they even have older machines that are not sold anymore but still need technical support.

Another important ability that the service center has is to tap biomedical engineers anywhere through its information portal. This allows service of legacy equipment by specialized technical staff or consultants wherever they may be.

"Let's say we have an older product, a vintage product still in use. With the capability we have in Atlanta an engineer in Iowa could be supporting someone in Florida. We can get the customer or the engineer to the right remote person anywhere within the Philips network," he said.

Service of medical equipment is more important than ever with today's advanced, computer integrated technologies. Also, with an industry-wide sales slump, and uncertainty over health care reform, service of the installed base takes greater priority.

"It's an opportunity to truly differentiate ourselves in our customers' eyes, investing in technology to better serve them," Thomas said. "Sales sells the first piece of equipment and service sells the second."

Source: Philips