Customer service is a key factor that differentiates a healthcare enterprise from others. They must take extra efforts to meet this criterion. However, medical staffs lack the expertise needed to take those extra efforts. It becomes an additional burden on them who already have their plate full of medical care responsibilities towards patients.
In such a scenario, it is ideal to outsource healthcare call center services to third-party experts. They execute a gamut of patient support and management services that frees medical staff to focus on their core duties. Here’s a look at the range of patient management operations supported by an outsourced medical call center service provider.
A-Z Services Covered by Healthcare Call Center
Physician Referral Services
Callers request their preferences such as specialty, distance, gender, among others while searching for a doctor.
Insurance Verification
Coordinate with insurance carriers to complete pre-certification, pre-authorization, and pre-determination processes on hospitals’ behalf.
Appointment Reminder
Take a multichannel approach to streamline appointment scheduling and reminder. This effectively eliminates patient no-shows.
Revenue Recovery
Proactively follow up with insurers for claims reimbursements.
Activation Services
Assist in activating insurance claims, health plans, among other things.
Surveys
Conduct regular surveys to gauge patients’ experience. The feedback is used to bring service level improvements.
Introduce Products or Services
Convey the newest product and services line to customers.
Talent Acquisition
Connect with talents for recruitment.
Rate Change Update
Timely update on changes in rates of any medical treatment.
Seminar Registrations
Update on medical seminar registration start and end date, and the procedure to register.
Top 4 Reasons Why You Should Outsource Healthcare Call Center Services
Healthcare call center bridges the gap between service providers with patients through multiple mode of communication. This is cost effective and is critical to foster satisfactory patient experience. Here’s looking at the top 4 reasons that will convince you to outsource healthcare call center services:
Cost Efficient
Hospitals will have to invest significantly on salaries, medical benefits, office spaces, inbound and outbound network equipment, and others to maintain an in-house call center team. This is a recurring expense that will have a direct bearing on hospitals’ annual revenue.
Third-party vendors do not need office space since they work remotely, and they already have their own network infrastructure. This allows them to execute all the healthcare-related call center tasks at half the investment done in an in-house team.
Patient Follow-up Efficacy
Patient experience does not stop at receiving the right medical treatment. The evolution of payment models such as bundled payments and value-based care has set patients’ expectations of hospital following up on their post-treatment well-being.
Mostly, medical caregivers have their hands full of attending patients every day. This is why chances are high that they miss out on their follow-up duties. Healthcare call centers schedule outbound calls on behalf of medical caregivers to execute a range of functions beyond just patient follow-up. These functions are:
- Appointment reminders
- Pre-appointment admission assistance
- Post-hospital discharge follow-up
- Patient satisfaction feedback
Assist Insurance Verification Related Queries
A significant portion of customers’ queries is related to medical insurance such as services covered by insurers, insurance eligibility, and others. Most of the time, medical staff do not have to the right knowledge base to answer these queries accurately. This increases the chance of patients encountering surprise fees on their invoice.
Outsourced healthcare call center service providers have access to insurance portals. This helps them to answer any medical insurance coverage related queries accurately.
Curb in Patient No-show Rate
Hospitals and individual practitioners lose out in millions because of a high patient no-show rate every year. A high no-show rate is particularly observed in case of follow up visits or medical report submission. Or simply because patients forget their appointment date.
Healthcare call center agents record all patients’ interactions and appointment dates. They access these records to either manually call or set an automatic reminder to patients about their impending appointment dates.
Parting Note
The healthcare sector is gradually warming up to the idea of outsourcing call center services and it is rewarding them with numerous benefits. However, it is critical that you make a careful choice while partnering with a third-party call center service provider. You must judge your outsourcing partner on two levels- service level and scheduling expertise. Service level expertise includes the number of calls they can attend in an hour, call routing accuracy, issue resolution TAT, among others. Scheduling expertise refers to an agent’s ability to patient no-show rate by scheduling appointment reminder call, physician referral handling, pre-service payment collection reminder, and so on.
