Case Study: Multilingual 24/7 Emergency Order Service

Overview

A new client approached us for help in setting up a 24/7, multilingual, call centre to process and triage emergency orders for a time sensitive, unlicensed pharmaceutical product used as an antidote to chemotherapy.

The medicine is licensed in the USA and the client was looking to distribute it throughout the EU and Australia.

Challenge

The pharmaceutical product is used in cases of toxicity arising from use of a commonly prescribed chemotherapeutic agent. The US license for the product specifies that in order to be effective, patients needed to be treated with the medicine within 96 hours of exposure to the chemotherapeutic agent. The nature of the toxicity meant that patients could present at any time and require immediate treatment.

This created the need for an ordering solution that was robust, reliable and efficient so that the customer could place an order at any time of day and be guaranteed that it would be received, processed quickly and arrive at the correct destination in enough time to treat the patient.

The client was planning to warehouse the product in the United Kingdom and distribute it on a named patient basis to patients based in the European Union and Australia. This created the additional problem overcoming the language barriers involved in offering the product throughout the European Union.

Our solution

Setting up a multilingual helpline

ESMS has extensive experience in the setup of telecommunications infrastructure and provision of 24/7 emergency medical response services globally in 45 different languages. ESMS worked with the client to develop the logistics of the service and created SOPs to describe how urgent orders would be handled by our experienced scientific staff and how they would then be triaged to the client to ensure the order was dispatched quickly and successfully. ESMS Information Scientists all hold a minimum qualification of a life science degree (including toxicology, pharmacology and pharmacy). Information scientists (ISs) are rostered around the clock 24/7/365 to ensure continuous service.

Our language support model uses five third-party interpretation vendors to ensure that our scientific team were able to handle questions from the customer and process order for the product in any European language, at any time of day. Together with the client, we have established a robust ordering service including the following features:

  • Accurate and timely intake of product orders.
  • Follow up calls to customer to ensure order has been placed successfully.
  • Ensure distribution of the product from order to destination in a maximum of 24 hours.
  • Triage of orders to the client to ensure the order has been received and dispatched.
  • Forward of out of scope calls to the relevant party.
  • Distribution of product information.
  • Resolving queries surrounding tracking of orders in transit.
  • Establishment of a separate Australia ‘hub’ and ordering.

Outcome and benefits

  • Time-critical delivery of essential antidote.

  • Flexibility to change and improve processes throughout the life of the service.

  • The client is secure knowing that their ordering service is
    available around the clock.

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