Category: Healthcare Contact Center

Are you considering a centralized healthcare contact center in your organization’s patient access strategy? For this, you need to look beyond the typical “switchboard” mindset.

In our experience, a centralized patient contact center is not the right fit for every healthcare organization’s patient access strategy. A very high level of stakeholder involvement and alignment is needed for such an access strategy to be implemented.

There are significant rewards to be reaped when you transition your call center to a higher purpose – to improve patient access and patient satisfaction. Consider the following:

1. Reduced call abandonment rate, faster time to answer calls – thereby improving patient satisfaction.
2. Helping your clinical and non-clinical staff to focus on patient care rather than back-office, administrative processes.
3. Digital transformation and streamlining appointment booking across care sites 24/7.
4. Standardizing provider scheduling rules, patient intake and various other operational procedures.
5. Gaining staffing economies of scale that’s impossible to do so if staffed at individual locations.
6. Centralizing medical marketing and referral leakage across sites
7. Introducing new 24/7 patient access points over web, social media, chat, mobile texting, voice

If you build and operate a patient contact center that goes beyond the typical switchboard, the rewards are tremendous. An appropriate patient access center strategy typically includes:

1. Practice operations services like patient intake, registration, appointments, reminders, no-show recalls, cancellation recalls, reappointing patients fallen out of care, referral coordination, clinic messaging, fax management, various revenue cycle management processes, MIPS reporting etc.
2. Clinical services – technician or nurse triage based on telephone or HIPAA secure chat, prescription management, telehealth management, outreach campaigns etc.
3. Post acute coordination – surgery dispatch coordination, adherence coordination, outbound referrals coordination etc.
4. Virtual care facilitation – for telemedicine, patient portal activation support, peer to peer provider e-consults etc.

However, before you jump into creating a patient centric contact center for your organization, ask yourself a few key questions.

1. Is your organization really ready to be patient centric (rather than being provider focused)?
2. Are you willing to accept and promote centralization that invariably leads to standardization?
3. Are your providers willing to give up some control over their scheduling preferences?
4. Are you willing to go through significant change management work?
5. Are you ready for defined accountabilities and communication channels?

Read the rest of our guides to learn more