The healthcare industry underwent rapid changes in the past two years while responding to the COVID challenges. The pandemic has drastically changed patient care and patient expectations. To manage these expectations and deliver a stellar patient experience, healthcare institutes and medical practitioners need to streamline their patient interactions.
Why is patient experience necessary for your business?
Today, healthcare organizations aim to achieve financial objectives while improving patient satisfaction and experience. As a result, patient experience has become a key differentiator for healthcare business success. Patients with excellent experience are highly likely to return and recommend your healthcare organization to others. However, if the patients are unhappy with your service, they will switch to your competitor and post negative feedback about your organization on various social media platforms. On the other hand, satisfied patients will remain loyal to your brand, which will help increase your revenue and profitability. So, patient satisfaction and a positive patient experience are the keys to improving your brand reputation.
Studies show that:
51% of patients would change their healthcare provider for excellent customer service. This statistic alone shows how important it is to ensure a better patient experience with stellar customer service or patient service. The time has come to take such data into account and start acting upon them.
Are you yet to focus on improving patient experience? In that case, it is high time to do so before a simple incident of poor patient experience leads to patient attrition, loss of revenue, and diminishing brand reputation. Outsourcing some of your crucial patient care and engagement services to a healthcare call center can help deliver better patient experience and patient satisfaction.
Improve communication with patients:
Communication is the key to an excellent patient experience. When your healthcare call center partner answers calls with enthusiasm and answers all their queries, it improves patient satisfaction. Prompt customer service and first-contact resolution always enhance patient experience and turn them into brand loyalists.
1. Improve communication with patients:
Communication is the key to an excellent patient experience. When your healthcare call center partner answers calls with enthusiasm and answers all their queries, it improves patient satisfaction. Prompt customer service and first-contact resolution always enhance patient experience and turn them into brand loyalists.
2. Optimize the appointment process:
Establishing a well-managed appointment scheduling system is another way to deliver a better patient experience. Offering an appointment-setting service during and after business hours using your healthcare call center partner can help your business cater to more patients and offer a better patient experience at the same time. In this digital age, you can also provide online appointment setting functionality to satisfy those patients who prefer self-service.
3. Offer Appointment reminder:
Patients often forget about their medical appointments, leading to a loss of productivity for your organization. Therefore, it would help if you made an effort to remind them of their scheduled appointments and reschedule them when they fail to appear. With a reminder setting service from a reputed call center for healthcare providers, you can offer timely and prompt reminder and appointment rescheduling services to your patients, making their way to receiving care hassle-free.
4. Be prompt in answering phone calls:
The golden rule of any healthcare call center is not keeping patients on hold for more than 30 seconds and not transferring calls unless absolutely necessary. You should also return phone calls and emails within a standard time frame. Hiring a healthcare BPO can easily ensure that all the phone calls are promptly answered. If you return the call or answer an email, you should also ensure an established time frame for responding. Doing so can significantly enhance the patient experience.
5. Simplify the billing process:
When you simplify your healthcare billing process, it becomes easier for patients to pay the bills. When your healthcare outsourcing partner can offer an accurate estimation of the bill and explain its components to the patient, it leads to better transparency and improves patient satisfaction. And when your patients are satisfied, they are much more likely to pay your bills on time.
6. Establish a process to get feedback:
One of the most frustrating situations patients can face is having a bad experience but never getting to vent concerns. Without the patient’s feedback, your organization will assume everything is fine while your patient is searching for a new healthcare provider. According to studies, 55 percent of patients who had a bad experience but received a satisfactory resolution returned to the same healthcare provider. So, you must keep asking for feedback and provide your patients with the opportunity to voice their concerns post-care. With the right outsourcing partner, you can efficiently conduct a post-care patient survey and gather valuable patient insight, which can then be incorporated into your healthcare operations to improve patient care.
7. Find ways to follow up with patients:
Receiving generic wellness plans would strengthen many patients’ bonds with their healthcare providers. While you can’t act as patients’ daily health coaches, you can engage them by sending them generic healthcare material between appointments. Doing so will improve patient engagement, make your patients feel valued, and improve their satisfaction and experience.
8. Protect Patient information:
In this age, information protection is one of the prerequisites of every industry. This is especially true for the healthcare industry, where healthcare organizations are liable to protect the healthcare information of their patients at all costs. Failing to do so can lead to huge fines under the HIPAA Act. However, with a HIPAA-compliant healthcare call center partner, protecting your patients’ healthcare information and offering a stellar experience is possible.
Patients today expect excellent customer service, quick information, and fast issue resolution from their healthcare provider. Therefore, to meet that expectation and offer a superior patient experience simultaneously, you need to team up with a HIPAA-compliant healthcare call center that combines technology with the human touch—a winning formula for patient loyalty.
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