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Topic: Patient Access & Demand Conversion

EFS Access and Demand Conversion: turning inbound demand into booked, kept visits.

How to Choose the Best Outsourced Medical Call Center Partner

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Throughout the past several weeks, we’ve shared a series of blogs as a preface to the publication of our new white paper, Outsourced Medical Call Centers: Defining Success and Selecting the Best Partner. So far, we’ve explored various important subjects, including:

• Observations about medical call center statistics

• Misunderstood aspects about outsourced medical call centers

• Key advantages to using a medical call center

This time, we want to touch on some points the white paper makes about how to choose the best medical call center (for which some also use the terms healthcare call center, hospital call center and healthcare contact center). Similar to how there is often no one-size-fits-all for how hospitals provide treatment for patients, there is no universal solution for a how a hospital can use or select a medical call center. This becomes all the more valid when evaluating the pros and cons of in-house vs. outsourced medical call centers, whether for part- or full-time service. For example, when a hospital has a new patient with an uncertain medical condition, it will generally conduct a thorough examination to identify symptoms (problems) so that the proper treatment (solutions) can be prescribed. This is an excellent analogy for hospitals that are evaluating its healthcare call center needs and/or are exploring outsourced medical call center partners. The process for selecting the best outsourced medical call center is not unlike partnering with most other vendors; it requires analysis of several considerations to determine goals and optimize priorities.

Define Your “Value” Beyond “Cost”

For virtually all hospitals, the cost for an outsourced medical call center service will be the key factor in their decisions. Therefore, having a budget may expedite the process for potential vendors to quickly gauge how well they can satisfy a hospital’s medical call center objectives. However, efforts to define value beyond cost and budgets should not be taken lightly, as they not only help shape a hospital’s goals and expectations for its hospital contact center, but they also provide a framework for examining the quality of its potential vendor relationship. The following is a comprehensive series of crucial considerations.

Qualifications

• How thoroughly does the vendor describe its service’s capabilities and customer service?

• How well regarded is the vendor? Can it provide testimonials, third-party reviews, awards, etc.?

• How reliable is the vendor? Does it have a history of proven innovation and experience?

• How well does the vendor support its customers? What are its onboarding procedures?

Customization and Scalability

• Does the vendor’s service meet the hospital’s specific needs and objectives?

• Can the service be customized to meet current needs and objectives?

• Can the service be reduced or expanded to meet future needs and objectives?

HIPAA Compliance and Confidentiality

• Can the service demonstrate HIPAA compliance and patient confidentiality across all channels, including e-mail or text messages?

• Are its networks and data storage systems secure?

Analytics and Metrics

• Does the vendor provide analytics and metrics reports—and do they meet the hospital’s needs?

• Can the vendor demonstrate how it tracks accuracy and abandonment rates?

Identify Your Decision-makers and Delegate Responsibilities

Hospitals typically require buy-in from various departments and committees when choosing new vendors and suppliers, and an outsourced medical call center is no exception. Likewise, it is important to know which departments and staff will ensure success after a vendor is selected and the medical call center is activated.

Stakeholder and Decision-makers

• What departments or staff members should be consulted when determining needs and objectives for the medical call center?

• What departments or staff members will need to approve decisions to request proposals or finalize an agreement?

Onboarding

• Immediately after an outsourced medical call center is selected and a service is activated, what departments or staff members will need to be onboarded?

Detail Your Patient Demographics

Having a firm grasp on a hospital’s patient demographics may help it identify which potential outsourced medical call center partners can best serve its patients.

• Medical/Treatment Specialties: Will the medical call center handle general calls or will it work with specific departments, specialties or centers of excellence?

• Geography: What local, state or regional areas does the hospital serve?

• Multiculturalism: Are there significant numbers of patients whose first languages are not English?

• What percentage speak languages other than English?

Plan for Timing

Although more logistic matters should be addressed during onboarding after an outsourced medical call center is selected, it may be advantageous to be clear about logistical expectations prior to seeking potential partners.

• When would you expect to use your medical call center service?

• When would you want to launch your medical call center service?

Hopefully this blog series has given a better understanding of medical call centers, and we will continue to publish more blogs that provide our unique perspective on this invaluable service!
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Guideway Care is a cloud-based technology and services company that improves profitability and patient outcomes for hospitals and practices through end-to-end patient engagement solutions backed by clinical and non-clinical teams, including support for a nurse triage service. Its HIPAA-compliant, SaaS platform improves care team workflows, automates patient communication and tracks patient progress to optimize the patient journey. Since 2004, leading healthcare providers have trusted Guideway Care to help acquire, manage and engage patients through complex episodes of care.

Top 5 Healthcare and Medical Call Center Advantages and Benefits

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In recent weeks, we’ve discussed medical call centers (which are also sometimes called healthcare call centers, hospital call centers and healthcare contact centers) in two distinct ways:

• Observations about medical call center statistics

• Misunderstood aspects about outsourced medical call centers

What has yet to be discussed—or answered—is a simple question: What are the advantages and benefits of medical call centers? Although there is no single reason for why two-thirds of all U.S. hospitals utilize a medical call center (either outsourced or in-house), it can be argued their popularity is related to the many advantages and benefits that yield better experiences for their customers and superb value for the hospitals. In fact, according to a study referenced in our soon-to-be-published white paper, Outsourced Medical Call Centers: Defining Success and Selecting the Best Partner, we demonstrate healthcare call centers improve:

• Caller Satisfaction

• Department Satisfaction

• ROI

• Savings to Organization

Call Centers Improve Patient Engagement

Although it is often uncomfortable to think of healthcare as an “industry” and patients as “customers,” the reality is the transactional nature of healthcare subjects it to many of the same principles that guide the success of traditional retail and commercial businesses—which includes customer service. Although the Internet and smartphones have emerged as new and popular communication channels for providing healthcare customer service, live agent access via the telephone is still among most preferred channels for people that seek assistance. In our white paper, we show why the phone is the most preferred channel compared to:

• E-mail

• Live Chat

• Online Knowledge

• “Click to Call” Support

Further, as medical call centers continue to adopt other channels (and thus the evolution of the “medical contact center” term), they are also arguably becoming more capable of satisfying patients and increasing value for hospitals.

Call Centers Improve Patient Satisfaction

However, simply having a phone number for patients to call is not enough to provide satisfactory customer service. On the contrary, telephone communications that are perceived as slow or rely too heavily upon automation can yield negative feelings about a brand. Three-quarters of people that call customer service lines feel it takes too long to reach agents, and more than two-thirds will hang up (“abandonment”) if they cannot access a real person. In that context, providing real, reliable and personalized customer service representatives on the phone can significantly impact perceptions of a “happy customer experience in two ways,” which we explain in our white paper:

• Competent Service Rep

• Personalization

Thus, medical call centers that can provide swift, accurate and personal attention to patients may not only help reduce call abandonment rates, but may also result in better brand perceptions and referrals.

Call Centers Improve Patient Management and Follow-up Efficacy

The expansion of alternative payment models (e.g., value-based care, bundled payments) demands hospitals to continue to prioritize followups with patients to ensure satisfactory outcomes. Medical call centers that offer outbound calling and support services, such as nurse triage, are perfectly positioned to achieve advanced follow-up objectives, especially since outbound calling is the most common type of outbound call. Our white papers illustrates the rates for which medical call centers are used for:

• Post-Discharge Follow-up

• Appointment Reminders

• Pre-Appointment Admissions

• Patient Satisfaction

• Patient/Care Navigation

Call Centers Deepen Hospital Brand Awareness and Physician Referrals

As mentioned earlier, hospitals are unique in that its patients are not “customers” in the traditional sense of retail or commercial businesses, especially with respect to not grooming them to become “repeat customers.” However, some marketing fundamentals are universal, which includes positive word-of-mouth referrals—and why (as mentioned in our white paper) nearly three-quarters of patients have said they would recommend their hospital to friends and family.

Call Centers Have High Potential for Optimal Return on Investment (ROI)

Continuing on the theme of how medical call centers can expand brand awareness and referrals, they consequently are also thought to have a high potential for optimal return on investment (ROI). Our white paper shows how their estimated 3:1 ROI ratio has been attributed their proven ability to build brand loyalty.
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Guideway Care has been a leading healthcare call center provider for more than a decade. If you have been thinking about how to choose the best medical call center for your hospital, clinic or other healthcare facility, we are here to help find solutions.

Top Outsourced Medical Call Center Misconceptions

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Earlier this month, we published a blog, “Prefacing Our New Outsourced Medical Call Center White Paper” which provided an overview of the soon-to-be-launched Outsourced Medical Call Centers: Defining Success and Selecting the Best Partner. In anticipation of its launch, I thought I’d explore a concept that recurs in it: common misconceptions about outsourced healthcare call centers (also known as healthcare call centers, hospital call centers and healthcare contact centers).

An Outsourced Medical Center Means a Reduction of Control (and Quality)?

On the surface, it may seem that in-house healthcare call centers have a distinct advantage over outsourced medical call centers—namely, the ability to control vital components like:

• Staffing

• Training

• Monitoring

• Performance

However, there are two flaws in that assumption that are challenged in the white paper:

1. The presumed “advantage” of being burdened with the associated responsibilities of an in-house outweigh the benefit to have complete control.

2. Using an outsourced medical call center translates into a wholesale reduction of control.

The reality is the best outsourced medical call centers cannot only reduce the pressures of having to staff, train, monitor and maintain a call center, but they can also do it more optimally by the sheer benefit of specialization (and the wisdom and experience it yields). Further, the partner hospital never fully loses control. On the contrary, the better outsourced medical call centers will work with its partners to develop and revise customized phone scripts that enable call center agents to:

• Personalize calls for each patient by physician

• Ensure compliance with hospital-employed practices

• Enhance the patient experience

Likewise, the best outsourced medical call centers also typically record and monitor calls, which are crucial for the partner to trust the call center can :

• Ensure high standards are being maintained

• Conduct evaluations to improve training and performance

• Resolve complaints, disputes and conflicts that emerge from a call

Medical Call Centers Only Handle Inbound Calls?

Another common misperception the white paper discusses is that medical call centers only handle inbound calls. But, in reality, not only can they be used for outbound calling, but they are used almost as often as for inbound calls. Whether for inbound or outbound calls, outsourced medical call centers are superb resources for providing numerous patient support services that include:

• Referrals

• Admissions and Discharges

• Prescriptions

• Scheduling

• Education

In sum, outsourced medical call centers can be invaluable to a hospital’s patient engagement strategy, but finding the right solution begins with being well-informed, and our white paper one way to achieve that. Please be sure to download the white paper or get notified when it is published!
Brian Malone Guideway Care Contact Center Director. Guideway Care has been a leading healthcare call center provider for more than a decade. If you have been thinking about how to choose the best medical call center for your hospital, clinic or other healthcare facility, we are here to help find solutions.

What Medical Call Center Statistics Tell Us…and Inspire Us to Ask

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A few months ago, we wrote a blog, “How to Choose the Best Medical Call Center,” which attracted much attention—and which inspired us to discover and examine the reasons for its popularity. This process ultimately led to the development of a new white paper, Outsourced Medical Call Centers: Defining Success and Selecting the Best Partner, that we will soon be publishing. In the meantime, I thought I’d preface our white paper’s launch by exploring our audience’s interest in this topic and to share a little of what to expect in the white paper. It’s hard to argue with facts, and why we first looked at medical call center statistics to get some perspective. What we quickly noticed is there is a huge divide between those that do or don’t actively use a medical call center. Interchangeably known as healthcare call centers, hospital call centers and healthcare contact centers, medical call centers have become a commonplace component for patient communications and coordination. An estimated two-thirds of all hospitals (approximately 3800 hospitals, a figure that is growing) use a healthcare contact center (according to the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology study, Call Centers in Health Care: Effect on Patient Satisfaction). However, that remaining one-third accounts for more than 1900 hospitals that don’t have a medical call center, a sizable figure. That intrigued us: Why are hospitals so polarized when it comes to healthcare call centers, and how might this relate to interest in how to choose an outsourced medical device call center company? Forgive us for answering our own questions with more questions, but we found that using a Socratic method was the best way to find some conclusions. These questions included: For the hospitals that do use medical call centers:

• Why do they use call centers?

• Are their call centers part-time or full-time?

• Are their call centers in-house and/or outsourced?

• What functions and services do they provide?

• How well do they perform—and for what criteria?

For the hospitals that don’t use medical call centers:

• Why don’t they use call centers?

• What are their missed opportunities—whether for themselves and/or their patients?

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Our discussions yielded another provocative question that applied to all hospitals, regardless if they did or did not use a medical call center: What are the differences between an outsourced call center versus an in-house call center independently built, staffed, managed and operated? We determined that the best way to answer these questions (and others) would best be captured in a well structured, researched and illustrated white paper that:

• Defines medical call center structures, functions and capabilities

• Delineates medical call center advantages and benefits

• Validates the economic rewards of using a medical call center

Contemplating these questions creates paths to better understanding how a medical call center could be a potential solution for a multitude of challenges—whether for current hospital call centers that are not performing as well as they should or for those curious about how a healthcare contact center could improve their patient engagement strategy. Please be sure to download the white paper or get notified when it is published!
Brian Malone is Guideway Care Contact Center Director. Guideway Care has been a leading healthcare call center provider for more than a decade, including offering a nurse triage service. If you have been thinking about how to choose the best medical call center for your hospital, clinic or other healthcare facility, we are here to help find solutions.

How to Choose the Best Medical Call Center

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If you have been thinking about how to choose the best medical call center for your hospital, clinic or other healthcare facility, you likely have been carefully mulling over numerous considerations. Guideway Care, a medical call center provider with more than a decade of experience, understands that the decision requires extensive thought. The following are among the most important considerations for you as you either begin or conclude your process for narrowing down your choice of top medical call centers.

What Advantages Will You Gain From Having a Medical Call Center?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution for healthcare systems in search of medical call center service providers. For that matter, the potential advantages of having a call center can vary from facility to facility, which include:

• Reduced waiting times

• Improved patient retention rates

• More efficient use of facility staff

As your needs and expectations will also be unique to your facility, knowing them in advance will better prepare you to know which medical call center can best satisfy your objectives.

Why Would You Choose a Particular Medical Center Service Versus Another?

Naturally, knowing how much a medical call center service costs will be a key factor in your decision. Likewise, knowing your budget place can also help you differentiate how well one service versus another can meet your needs. However, the value for what you are buying can vary greatly and why you should consider other factors, such as:

• Reputation: How well regarded is the service? Is it an innovator with proven experience? Can they provide testimonials?

• Customization and Scalability: Do they offer a variety of services, including a nurse triage service that can be crafted into an ideal system that meets your needs and budget?

Knowing the answers and being able to prioritize them can significantly help the decisionmaking process—especially if the decision will be made by several people or departments.

Who is Involved in the Decisionmaking Process?

Hospitals in particular often require buy-in from various departments and committees when choosing new vendors and suppliers, and a medical call center is no exception. Identifying your facility’s stakeholders and decisionmakers is crucial, especially so you can understand their priorities and expectations before engaging with potential medical call center service providers.

How Well Does the Medical Call Center Service Support HIPAA Compliance and Confidentiality?

Trusting an outside company to handle your medical call center is not just a matter of ensuring that they will protect and support your brand, but also to ensure that they can fully support HIPAA compliance and patient confidentiality.

Who are Your Patients?

Although your call center may serve all of your patients, you might have  specific demographics (e.g., seniors) or conditions/treatments for which you anticipate more frequent call volumes. Having a firm grasp on this is important because it prepares you to determine if your call center service has the resources and experience to satisfy your patients.

Where are You and Your Patients Located?

Geography is an often overlooked concept for finding the best medical call center. For instance:

• Do your patients live exclusively within your state, or do you serve multiple states or regions?

• Do you serve areas that have a high percentage of people that speak languages other than English?

When Would You Expect to Use Your Medical Call Center Service?

Some busy hospitals may choose to have a 24/7 medical call center, as where a smaller clinic may prefer to only have an after-hours medical call center.

When Would You Want to Launch Your Medical Call Center Service?

How soon would you want to start using a medical call center service? Would it be a phased rollout that would first use the call center for after-hours but then would eventually become a full-time service?

Who Will be Responsible for Coordination Between Your Facility and the Call Center?

After you choose a medical center service, you will want to ensure a seamless transition, both with its introduction and regular transfers of incoming calls. Knowing who will be responsible for that coordination in advance will prepare you to gauge how much training and customer support will be needed from your service provider. If you have more questions about how to choose a medical call center or would like more information about Guideway Care medical call center solutions, please contact us.
Busy Medical Receptionist

Why Take a Gamble, Let MDnetSolutions Handle Your Patient Phone Calls

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Is your practice answering the phones in a timely and compassionate manner? Does lack of proper phone management interfere with your patients getting the proper care they deserve? Every call missed hurts not only your revenue, but more importantly your reputation. Don’t gamble when it comes to patient engagement. Let MDnetSolutions full-service, boutique orthopedic call center solve these problems for you.Busy Medical Receptionist As a seamless extension to your practice, our orthopedic call center provides the timely and compassionate assistance your patients need. We handle scheduling appointments right into your current scheduling book and we perform appointment reminders and rescheduling. Because our trained staff is here to serve, your patients speak to a live enthusiastic voice, eliminating the need to leave a message after hours or during high-volume call times. Not only do we provide your patients with top-notch scheduling services, MDnetSolutions also offers you a 24/7 NurseLine, providing access to a nurse triage servic, providing access to a nurse triage service staffed by professional RNs. Your patients are engaged around the clock, as our professionally-trained, HIPAA-compliant staff handles each call with dedication and compassion. 24/7, full-service, boutique orthopedic call center NurseLine When your practice teams with MDnetSolutions, your patients are always connected to you. Reach out and connect with us today. Be sure to visit our booth #27 at OrthoSummit 2014 and schedule a demo. Together we can transform patient care.
Busy Medical Receptionist

Our Doors Are Open For Patients All The Time

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Although the calendar says there’s three more weeks of summer remaining, the unofficial end of the season is looming for most, as Monday is Labor Day. Like several people, you are probably hitting the road this holiday weekend, trying to cram in that last family vacation before the kids go back to school. Perhaps it is heading to the beach or lake or perhaps checking out a baseball game or a road trip to catch your alma mater kick off the college football season. While you are away from the office, your patients’ problems are not taking a vacation. Mrs. Smith is concerned about an upcoming procedure; Mr. Jones has questions about a new medication, and Mrs. Jones can’t make her scheduled appointment for the following Tuesday and needs to reschedule. Another patient will take her last prescribed pill at 6:30 p.m., on Friday and realize she doesn’t have anymore refills. What are they supposed to do? Try calling your practice and leaving a message, hoping one of your employees may happen to swing by the office on his or her free time? Try calling you directly while you are enjoying a little R&R with the family and away from the rigors of your practice? By implementing MDnetSolutions patient management solutions, your patients stay connected to your practice. Whether you are hiking in the Rockies or fishing in the Florida Keys, your patients can reach your practice. When you put MDnetSolutions full-service, boutique medical call center to work for your practice, we become an extension of your staff. Just like your receptionists, our staff exercises sympathy and compassion when speaking with your valued patients. When a panicked mother, concerned about her child, reaches out to your practice, the last thing she wants to hear is a recording telling her to leave a message. With our patient management solution, that same mother talks with a real, live person on the other end of the line. Our staff offers sound medical advice and acts as a calming influence. With MDnetSolutions medical call center and our 24/7 NurseLine, staffed by registered nurses, your patients are able to connect and be engaged with your practice around the clock. So while you are working on your tan, perfecting your short game or cheering your favorite team to victory this weekend, be rest assured your patients are getting optimum medical advice and are able to get prescription refills and reschedule Tuesday’s appointment. If your practice has partnered with MDnetSolutions, kick back and enjoy the long weekend, knowing your patients are in good hands. If you haven’t made the call to us yet, imagine how many phone calls and potential new patients your practice is missing while your doors are closed. When teaming with MDnetSolutions, your practice becomes more patient-friendly because we never take a day off and are fully engaged with your patients. Check us out at www.mdnetsolutions.com and schedule a demo today.

Put Experts in Medical Call Center to Work

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Is your practice answering the phones in a timely and compassionate manner? Does lack of proper phone management interfere with your patients getting the proper care they deserve? Let Guideway Care full-service medical call center solve these problems for you.

As a seamless extension to your practice, our healthcare call center provides the timely and compassionate assistance your patients need.

We handle scheduling appointments right in to your current scheduling book and we perform appointment reminders and rescheduling. Because of our trained staff, your patients speak to a live enthusiastic voice, eliminating the need to leave a message after hours or during high-volume call times.

Not only do we provide your patients with top-notch scheduling services, Guideway Care also offers NurseLine services which provides access to arguably the finest nurse triage service available with professional RNs. Your patients are engaged around the clock, as our professionally-trained, HIPAA-compliant medical experts handle each call with dedication and compassion, regarding their treatment.  

Missed calls and long wait times can cost your practice thousands of dollars in revenue and hurts your reputation, your referrals and your patient satisfaction. All of these pressures can be eliminated with one call to Guideway Care.

When your practice teams with Guideway Care, your patients are always connected to you. Reach out and connect with us today. Contact Us Today!

Call Center, NurseLine saves time for a busy OB/GYN office and gives them a competitive advantage

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For over 10 years, MDnetSolutions has provided medical call center solutions for hundreds of healthcare organizations. We handle every call – patient scheduling, appointment reminders, and insurance pre-certification and authorization are just a few examples. We also have a NurseLine, staffed with RNs, who answer your patients’ questions. For Mid-City OB/GYN in Omaha, MDnetSolutions handles all of their patient calls and NurseLine. Read the latest Case Study about how MDnetSolutions helped them free up their staff’s time and helped give them a competitive advantage in their area. MDnet Case Study – Mid-City OB,GYN
medical call center

How a medical call center can help your practice

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medical call centerPatient intake. Scheduling appointments. Answering questions. Verifying insurance. Seminar and event registration. Patient outreach and recruitment. Patient followup. These can all be extremely time-consuming tasks for any medical office, especially for a small-to-medium-sized practice with only a few people making phone calls. That’s when a medical call center can be the perfect solution. Medical call centers are comprehensive resource-savers by allowing time to be spent elsewhere. MDnetSolutions’ medical call center does the heavy lifting for practices which need routine phone calls made to patients. Our patient care coordinators communicate with patients as a representative of your practice in a professional manner that is customized and  feels personal to them. We also provide nurse triage service to them around the clock. Our medical call center also features:
  • Call activity reporting
  • Call recording
  • Voice mail-to-email integration
  • NurseLine with registered RN’s in all 50 states
  • 100% HIPAA-compliant to ensure the privacy of your patients
To learn more about how you can integrate our medical call center into your practice, call us at 888-986-3638.

The Advantages of Using a Healthcare Call Center

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Renu Chopra at The Outsource Blog mentions the benefits of using an outsourced call center: “The main benefits of outsourcing call center outsourcing services is cost saving that can be derived from the reduction in overhead and labor costs required to host in-house call center. Call center allows a business to reduce the labor and infrastructure costs and the associated expenses by outsourcing work to any outside organizations that specialize in call center management activities.” MDnetSolutions offers a US-based, HIPAA-compliant medical call center that functions as an extension of your healthcare practice. Contact us today to learn how our patient care representatives can give your practice a voice.