Project Updates
New Food and Nutrition Call Center Goes Live
What would hospital food be without the tasty red Jello?
The way Emory's patients order food has been significantly upgraded with the new Food and Nutrition Call Center going live for the Mother/Baby (Maternity Ward) and EUOSH on October 19th with the use of new technologies. This is a new way for Emory to provide menu selection and ordering, now providing patients with the ability to phone in their menus. Venise Lee (Enterprise Services) worked diligently with Healthcare on this project, along with Jerry Mathis (Enterprise Services), who provided the training.
The EUOSH Food and Nutrition Services project has been in the works for over a year. Patient dining services has been around for a while now, where the patients can call a specific number, based on their hospital, and reach a representative who will take their food orders for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Processed through a system called CBORD, patient meal orders are telephoned into a Call Center (located in the MOB at EUOSH). In the call center, a Call Center Associate takes the meal order by pulling up on a touch screen computer monitor a copy of the menu specific to that patient’s diet. As the order is taken, the information is entered into the computer software. Once submitted, the information will print out on a meal assembly ticket located in the kitchen at EUHM or EUOSH so that staff can prepare, assemble and deliver the meal to the patient within a guaranteed delivery time of 45 minutes from the time the call was placed.
Before, the food ordering call centers were scattered about. People would call a number that rang in multiple extensions and whoever answered the phone would process the order. With this new call center, Food and Nutrition Services can now be centralized, offer the services to more people (by expanding it to all Emory Hospital patients), and be more efficient which should lead to patients getting their food quicker.
Venice completed all of the programming then stayed at EUOSH on the first day to make sure everyone was trained and that there were no issues. EUH is planned to go live in January.
The new call center has 20 part-time call specialists, working from 6:30 am to 7:00 pm seven days a week. The customer calls average about 500 per meal, which ultimately could result in 1500 calls a day.
Great job by Venice and Jerry!
- Mary Kinney, Manager, Enterprise Services