Patient experience and patient satisfaction are the topmost concerns of the healthcare industry. What, according to you, can help meet these primary healthcare objectives? We believe seamless communication with the patients is the only way out to reap the benefits.
According to a Joint Commission study by HIPAA Journal, 80% of medical errors happen due to miscommunication with the patients. This happens due to multiple reasons –
- · You have agents with poor patient communication skills.
- · You have an outdated communication system to handle patient interactions .
- · You have poor management of medical data.
All these lead to data breaches, higher cost consumption, and misuse of resources and time. This is when outsourcing healthcare call centers come into existence.
The healthcare BPO agents are well-known for providing optimum medical answering services to the patients, thus establishing strong brand credibility in the market. They leverage the best practices to offer effective and smooth communication in the healthcare industry.
Here is the list of the healthcare call center practices.
6 Best healthcare call center practices that can improve patient satisfaction
1. Increase empathy:
Call center agents have great knowledge and skills regarding dealing with patients' concerns and showcase empathy. They use different techniques to establish a good rapport with the patients and gain their trust in no time. They listen carefully to the patient's concerns, understand their priorities, and try to deliver absolute solutions in no time. This encourages the patients to share their problems with the agents and satisfy them by pacifying their needs.
Look for the BPO agencies where agents are well-trained about the practices that can improve the patient experience and their satisfaction level. They have comprehensive knowledge about the medical facility and can literally deliver accurate responses to the queries. The best thing is they know how to communicate with the patients as per the situation demands and give them a scope to ask questions for better clarity.
2. Introduce modern communication systems:
Many hospitals and clinics, especially those running for years, use traditional communication systems to connect with the patients. The poor communication systems reduce the chance of upgrading the patient’s experience, making it harder to establish a robust relationship between the patients and the healthcare service providers.
The healthcare BPOs use an excellent healthcare CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform to support the patients and their requirements. They leverage CRM-based software that is specifically designed to make appointments, handle healthcare documents, manage patient portfolios, share prescription details, and perform various other patient-related activities.
Integrating the CRM software into the system, the healthcare agents improve the communication infrastructure, thus making it easier for the medical staff to perform multiple other tasks in a convenient way.
3. Offer multiple communication channels:
Nowadays, people prefer using social media, live chat, email, phone, and video chat to communicate. An ideal healthcare call center uses all these prominent channels to communicate with the patients and improve the overall patient experience. This is why the multi-specialty hospitals and clinics reach out to a healthcare BPO company in USA to enjoy the compelling benefits.
Every modern communication system comes with multiple communication channels so that patients find it easier to share their problems and get them resolved in no time. For example, they use video chats to demonstrate complicated procedures that are harder to explain over a phone call or regular chats. The well-trained agents use the most appropriate channel to connect with the patients and build a strong patient-staff rapport.
4. Monitor patient calls and quality:
Unless you monitor the routine calls by the patients and evaluate the call quality, it is harder for the healthcare management team to gain patient insights. Outsourcing healthcare call center services will give you the flexibility to gain insightful data on the patient experience.
The agents keep tracking the inbound and outbound calls to generate a real-time report holding patient satisfaction rate, average call handling time, net promoter score, first response time, and so on. Do you really think you can perform the same process without seeking call center support? We guess not!
A healthcare BPO never forgets to practice this step to improve call quality and agent performance. Apart from optimizing their own performances, call quality monitoring reports aid the healthcare agents to improve patient interactions and their experience to a wide extent.
5. Collect feedback:
Next important healthcare BPO practice is collecting feedback on a regular basis. Hospitals and clinics always look forward to upgrading the patient experiences. But this won’t be possible unless you know what exactly your patient thinks about you. Post-treatment survey programs are the only way to collect patient feedback and ratings. Well, do you think the healthcare managers will be capable of gathering patient reviews in a routine manner?
Healthcare managers hardly have enough time to work on these approaches. That's the reason why they prefer relying on the HIPAA-compliant healthcare BPO service provider. The agents gather quality feedback from the patients, listen to them cautiously, and then evolve the process so as to benefit the medical staff and patients.
6. Ensure security with HIPAA compliant:
The HIPAA act of 1996 states that the healthcare providers and members associated with the organization ensure securing the information while transferring, handling, or sharing it with others. It takes care of the security of protected health information (PHI) to avoid unwanted expenses and vulnerable activities.
Healthcare service providers thus seek the help of the HIPAA-compliant BPO companies to prevent security breaches. The well-trained agents use advanced tools and technologies to encrypt the data, protecting confidential information to a significant extent.
Conclusion
Are you struggling with communication challenges in your healthcare industry? It is high time to fix this problem in order to stay consistent in the market and deliver a high-quality patient experience. The modern healthcare industry is searching for a HIPAA-compliant BPO service provider to streamline the overall workflow and ensure a healthier environment for the patients.
Find the best healthcare BPO company in USA or any other region near you and satisfy your patients with their requirements.
