The Healthcare industry is going through dramatic shifts across many variables: the industry’s approach to value-based care, cost management, patient experience and loyalty, and dynamic changes to regulations and care delivery during a pandemic.
Good providers recognize that they need good, competent partners to keep pace with market, patient, and safety needs, and new opportunities created by technology and regulatory changes. Those who don’t may find themselves struggling to retain patient loyalty or balance costs and quality of delivery well.
From a Patient Experience perspective, every touch – from setting an appointment to in-office or telehealth visit to post-visit follow-up – is critical to delivering Five Star quality. How your hospital, clinic, or practice can do so while balancing costs and increasing care and satisfaction is key.
So, what can a healthcare-specialized outsource partner provide?
- Increased Patient Satisfaction
- Outsourced provider call center partners recruit, hire, and train HIPAA-compliant contact center associates with a focus on healthcare resolutions, efficiency, and high empathy. This is their specialty, while yours is caring for patients in your facility or on a telehealth call. These partners are typically more adept at effectively triaging a call, email, chat, or text with a patient, and have the technology to engage more efficiently on your behalf. More so, they can often implement services via live agent or automation that extends the hours and ways that patients can engage and get the information they need: any time, anyway. If your patients, doctors, or insurers complain about long hold times – or worse, abandon calls trying to reach you – then a specialized contact center partner may be right for you.
- Reduced Total Cost of Operations (TCO)
- If you are paying expert staff and clinicians to answer phones, is that the best use of your budget or their expertise? Too often, that front line call may be asking about office hours, appointment schedules, what to bring or how to use telehealth services. A call center partner is adept at triaging these calls, answering the simpler ones and appropriately engaging your experts only when needed. Several good partners today even offer clinical staff at a much lower rate than your own fully-loaded costs. Further, the technology and innovation that a good partner brings can offer your patients, doctors and payers easier ways to engage at much lower total costs. Expanded services at a lower overall cost become a no-brainer.
- Diverse Partnered Services for your Practice, Clinic or Hospital
- Healthcare outsourcing services are diverse and highly scalable if you want to reduce costs and risk, consolidate skilled resources and grow. Good partners can provide associates trained across broad engagements in both the contact center and back office. Initial scheduling, general queries, eligibility, pre-authorizations, billing, claims and post-visit follow-ups – all viable fits for a partner – complement your in-house teams, expand resources more cost-effectively and handle backlogs or after-hours calls. You can retain your best in-house resources while growing more cost-efficient and effective teams with your partner.
- Innovation and Compliance
- Member and patient services – people, platforms, telephony and data sources – all fall under HIPAA compliance and often agency regulatory like CMS for Medicare and Medicaid. A good partner will help complement your EHR system with omnichannel engagement platforms, cloud telephony, robust reporting and processes that are compliant and ensure the PHI of your patients. While expertise and compliance were once core reasons why providers would not outsource, today they are often the definitive reasons to outsource. Good outsource partners often bring better, more compliant patient engagement systems to the relationship without the need for you to invest, maintain and keep up with innovation.
- Boost ROI through Loyalty, Retention, Referrals and Ratings
- Are you struggling to retain patients? Are you at risk of losing Five Star ratings, or trying to attain them? Do your surveys suggest patient dissatisfaction? The problem could stem from issues with how and when your patients can reach you and the quality of those engagements. Perhaps your in-house staff is overextended or multitasking in the office and unable to give full attention to patient communications. High-quality associates in a partnered medical call center will elevate patient experiences to retain them, drive loyalty and referrals and positively impact your ratings.
Final Thoughts
Few providers today can go it alone efficiently, and most Five Star providers of scale have leveraged good outsource partnerships to help them achieve their goals. From patient experience and innovation to cost savings and compliance, the benefits from the right relationship are numerous.
