Establishing a contact centre for public health care

A growing part of population is used to performing transactions on-line via the Internet, even in relationships to authorities. Not even the health care sector can escape this trend. Patients put pressures on health care providers through contacting them through telephone and the Internet. In this article we discuss the future of contact centres in health care. We scan through the literature on the issue, present published projects and systems on the field, and build a conceptual model of the health care contact centre and its function. As a case example we follow the first steps of a contact centre to be implemented to the primary health care of the city of Turku. For this and clarity reasons, we restrict our discussion to the public health care, where customers can not be selected, and the operation is not run for profit, and to the mastering of acute diseases, where interaction with the customer needs to be fast and based on an individual transaction rather than a lasting patient-doctor relationship.