“We had used other interpretation services before and were not satisfied,” notes Kim Gustafson, US Netcom’s Vice President of Business Development. For that important component, US Netcom turned to MAGNUS for help. What it didn’t have is the internal expertise to translate or record the necessary scripts into multiple languages. It also offered the capability to deliver reminders via text message and email.
The company specializes in creating notification solutions and has telecommunication centers that could handle the large volume of calls that needed to be made each evening. WIC released a public Request for Proposal for its Automated Notification System for WIC Reminders (ANSWR) and ultimately chose US Netcom to handle the project. WIC management felt there was an opportunity to streamline the reminder process by replacing it with a centralized system that could also better accommodate other languages.
#WIC OREGON SOFTWARE#
And there was also the issue of maintaining hardware and software in each clinic.” In addition, calls were delivered in English or Spanish only, yet Oregon’s WIC clinics had clients who spoke many different languages. In some areas, there were not enough phone lines to get all the calls made before it got too late in the evening.
#WIC OREGON MANUAL#
“It required a manual process every night at each local agency to run the autodialer. “Every WIC clinic was responsible for generating its own appointment reminder calls,” she states. According to Kim Word, who manages the WIC data system for the state, the old autodialer was becoming cumbersome and not as effective as it needed to be. In order to encourage higher attendance at appointments, WIC had previously been utilizing a scheduler tool that used a hardware autodialer to deliver appointment reminders via phone. In the State of Oregon, the Oregon Health Authority’s Office of Family Health is responsible for managing the WIC Program. WIC provides Federal grants to states for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children who are found to be at nutritional risk.
The Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program is a federally funded program administered by the U.S.