In almost every part of the world, there are call centers for healthcare practices available as an outsourced model of service for running a business more efficiently.
Healthcare call center services have ramped up the patient-provider relationship in the healthcare industry. About two-thirds of all US hospitals employ call centers for various purposes, and that count is steadily increasing with more growth and development in the medical field.
However, with the increasing number of patient calls and inquiries, it has become difficult for healthcare organizations to offer a balanced patient experience and customer service. Setting up healthcare call center services has become the need of the hour.
Here is how you can set up an in-house call center or go for outsourcing healthcare services.
Although access to the internet and access to smartphones have become popular communication channels for providing self-help services, live agent assistance through support calls is still among the most preferred channels for patients to seek medical help.
What are healthcare call center services?
Healthcare call centers, also known as hospital call centers, act as a confluence of the patient and healthcare teams. It provides information on online messaging, patient demographics, and all healthcare records in one place.
With technology up-gradation, the healthcare industry is also shifting gears towards delivering multi-prolonged counseling. From the first inquiry to post-recovery consultation, healthcare call centers focus on generic functions like patient appointment scheduling and referrals.
But not the revolutionized ones cater to special functions. They not only handle appointment scheduling duties but also nurse triage and advertising strategies. In a nutshell, they act as a multi-departmental team that takes care of home telemedicine, home healthcare services, and emergency services faster, simpler, and value-addedly.
The importance of the telephone triage process:
With medical call centers, everything is simplified with the telephone triage process for assessing a patient’s symptoms and signs of illness.
This is important because some patients are not sure if they are experiencing a true emergency, and some may face issues with transportation or other reasons. Triage is dealing with numerous patients every day by sorting patients based on their needs as per their health background.
Since there exists a multitude of healthcare options available in every region, it sorts the patients to the right care and also schedules a convenient time for appointments with a trained healthcare professional near you.
Call centers in healthcare: Benefits:
Offering healthcare call center services to patients can be great for nearly all healthcare systems. Partnerships can offer patients 24/7 hospital call centers with emergency department metrics and lower re-admission rates.
Moreover, it ensures that patients receive the required help from experienced triage nurses. Below mentioned are a few advantages of outsourcing healthcare services.
Focus on patient care and medical research: All the secondary healthcare duties like data entry, billing, inventory management, and insurance claims processing are pretty tedious and time-consuming tasks to manage. It also overburdens the healthcare staff for no reason. Outsourcing these tasks to a Healthcare BPO services firm reduces the overall burden on the healthcare staff, and this allows them to focus more on the core activities like research and medical treatment. Handing over the secondary duties to outsourcing companies can improve the physician-patient relationship.
Cost-effectiveness: It does not seem to be a major reason for the care providers to outsource, but it could be proven to be a game-changer for clinics and hospitals trying to move their expenses to focus solely on patient care and hospital operations. Healthcare BPO services companies can help reduce operational expenses so that healthcare institutions will not require hiring and training in-house staff to execute the daily mundane chores. These extra savings can enhance the existing healthcare functions.
Quality Patient Care: The hospital’s savings by outsourcing medical billing and medical coding services are utilized in other hospitals’ development tasks. This can help provide quality patient care and expand existing resources. As a result, even the staff also becomes less burdened. So, they can invest more time and energy in taking care of the patients, especially in a pandemic crisis; every minute saved is critical for the ailing patients.
Avoid Costly Mistakes: Every minute detail holds great value in the healthcare industry. Hospitals and clinics require to maintain patient records, customer privacy, and other medical information. On top of that, healthcare providers have to process medical insurance claims and navigate through the procedures of each insurance provider. In addition to taking care of patients, these activities usually overburden the in-house staff, which increases the chances of human error. The right Healthcare BPO services company can seamlessly take the tasks like billing and processing of medical claims from the hospitals.
Access to Experts- Choosing to partner with the appropriate BPO firm can add additional value to the healthcare institution as the outsourcing will help the hospitals gain access to the professionals in the industry who are highly trained to handle the tasks of medical transcriptions and data processing. In addition, by seeking expert service, healthcare organizations can save operational costs and minimize the burden of the extra tasks on medical errors.
Proactive Appointment and Engagements– Healthcare providers can improve the gap between them and their customers/patients by providing the required information even before they ask for it. This means that the healthcare channels can connect with their patients through multiple channels like emails, SMS, and voice calls. With the help of these communication channels, hospitals can notify their patients about their scheduled or canceled appointment details and file deadlines and offer any additional information. In addition, healthcare providers can anticipate the next step in progress. They can help in adding valuable content and guide the customers to connect with an agent who will help them with their queries.
Error-free medical bills- Healthcare providers have to deal with numerous medical records every day. And, unlike other industries, coding and billing of medical records can be quite complicated. As a result, a lack of knowledge and expertise can lead to expensive billing errors during processing patients’ bills. Outsourcing medical billing services to a healthcare inbound call center provides the hospital access to an expert team of experts who are experts in dealing with all types of medical records, thus preventing any coding or billing hiccups.
Conclusion
When outsourced or maintained in-house, healthcare call center services help keep track of the patient records that help the hospitals and the healthcare providers have better interaction with the patients. These track records help create a roadmap for the medical staff to understand the issues of the patients more appropriately.