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Area Development - Site Selection, Facility Planning and Workforce Development

Kaiser Permanente Northwest Opens Regional Contact Center In Hillsboro, Oregon

01/11/2016
Kaiser Permanente Northwest opened its new 49,000 square foot Tanasbourne Regional Contact Center, a 400-employee facility that will house all of the region's appointing and advice nurse services, as well as a physician-led virtual care team in Hillsboro, Oregon.

According to company officials its new contact center, the previous site of a Netflix call center, is located in Hillsboro in part because the city's advanced infrastructure met the contact center's sophisticated technology and telephony requirements. The Kaiser Permanente employees stationed at the site relocated from locations across Portland, and the new center will provide ongoing career opportunities for Hillsboro residents. The center increases Kaiser Permanente's Hillsboro presence, which also includes Westside Medical Center and the Hillsboro Medical Office.

"Bringing these services together in a single, state-of-the-art facility allows us to give our members a seamless experience whether they call for an appointment, health advice or a virtual visit with a physician," said Belinda Green, Kaiser Permanente Northwest's senior director of member relations. "We think of this not as a call center, but a service center that will ultimately enable a better connection between members and their physicians."

For example, Kaiser Permanente will implement a service in 2016 that helps new members take care of all their immediate needs – such as selecting a new physician, transferring their prescriptions and setting up mobile access to personalized services on kp.org – in one phone call. The physician-led virtual care team, called Regional Telephonic Medicine, has evolved since its inception eight years ago to become an increasingly important point of access to care for patients. The facility supports the team with improved video and digital technology.

Kaiser Permanente's Mobile Health Partners program will be based at the new contact center as well. In partnership with Kaiser Permanente, Metro West Ambulance dispatches paramedics for nonemergency visits to patients' homes, where they can then do video consults with a physician. Physicians stationed at the center conduct these and other telephone and video appointments.

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