By Bronson Tang
In Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare, connecting effectively with service providers through multiple channels of communication is the key to implementing better patient experiences and minimizing costs. Optimized call center operations can play a crucial role in achieving these goals.
These days, VA healthcare providers are becoming more patient-centric, thus raising the demand for call centers. With an increased expectation for patient-retention initiatives, appointment scheduling, and communications with referring medical professionals, health centers must keep pace with new communications technologies. VA healthcare providers can extend their support to the patients by using call center services. This reduces call volume and results in more effective patient care by staff.
Healthcare and the VA
The level of convenience and the service offered to patients is different when VA healthcare providers use call center technology as a part of their practice. Most importantly, patients will always have continuous access for assistance.
Hospital management is an important responsibility. Therefore, it’s necessary to ensure the smooth functioning of the complete process. Hospitals need to take care of everything from equipment management to the maintenance of records for the smallest details. In this condition, a medical call center can help a hospital by handling activities such as record maintenance, appointment setting, patient follow-up calls, and appointment reminders. In addition, call center agents can also use email to check in with patients on a regular basis.
Customers satisfaction has always been critical for businesses. This is applicable for VA healthcare providers as well. Providing accurate information to a patient is important since the well-being of the patient depends upon the services they receive. Therefore, automating the complete process can be one of the major requirements hospitals should address. On the other hand, hospitals should also ensure that the personnel employed by a customer service center are familiar with patients’ needs and have the skills and expertise to address different situations.
The call center also brings improved customer satisfaction to hospital employees because it enables them to complete tasks and still provide service to veterans. Call center agents help check veterans in, assist them with the self-service kiosk, and call them to remind them of their appointments.
A Focus on Customer Satisfaction
Call centers have improved customer satisfaction with VA healthcare by answering calls from patients to VA healthcare professionals and then directing them to whoever needs to call them back. If veterans are sick and need immediate medical attention, call center staff can help. With the call center answering all incoming calls, VA healthcare primary care teams can provide better customer service to veterans.
When patients call their doctor’s office, the last thing they want to deal with is a cranky receptionist or, just as bad, be stuck on hold. Healthcare call centers can respond quickly to patients, reduce the burden on administrative staff, and help improve the patient experience.
Without the constant interruption of phone calls, VA healthcare physicians can focus on the tasks at hand. This means that proper billing coding, prescription refills, diagnostic authorizations, and chart preparation all receive more focus.
Scheduling efficiency also improves. When you have a dedicated call center staff, fewer scheduling mistakes will occur, resulting in less rescheduled or missed appointments. Centralized call center staff also know which doctors are at what locations on any given day. This eliminates the possibility of a patient calling the Middletown office looking for Dr. Smith (who only works in Somerset) and hearing the words “We don’t have a Dr. Smith.”
Call Center Capabilities
Call centers bridge the gap between the front and back offices by maintaining administrative activity records of patients and prescriptions, which are often inefficient and difficult to manage. Call center services can prioritize and proactively distribute this work anywhere in the organization. Call centers can also provide business intelligence that improves operational efficiency, meets SLAs, and measures regulatory compliance.
Currently, many medical staff are doing multiple jobs, including answering a variety of patient calls: general questions, upcoming appointments, and benefit coverage. A VA healthcare call center opens communication within departments by outlining what needs to be collected, establishing a hand-off process, and ensuring accountability.
A healthcare call center helps ensure that every patient is set on a positive path. Patients today have options. They can always find another provider. That’s why every phone interaction must strive to be perfect. If patients have an urgent need, they should get an appointment the same day. A quality call center will work with patients to make sure their experiences are positive. Companies who fail to train well often deliver bad service, with rude agents or agents that lack the level of sympathy, empathy, or professionalism that patients expect.
For many physicians, the biggest pain point is their daily practice management issues and challenges, such as a lack of staff. They simply don’t have the number of administrative staff to efficiently operate. And on the clinical side, it’s the same; they’re strapped. Healthcare call center support can remove the burden from both sides. It is an ideal situation for physicians and their entire practice.
A Focus on Quality
A quality call center helps retain patients. When patients are helped in their time of need, they return. That’s the biggest ROI for any physician or practice.
But again, there’s also help for the administrative and clinical staff. A call center can work with them to ensure that they get the right appointment for each patient. An experienced agent can handle the entire transaction and allow the clinical team more time with their patients. This helps every patient get into the office and lets practitioners engage with patients who will return for care.
Call centers provide proactive engagement and notifications. Proactive customer service in VA healthcare is a challenging objective for providers and physicians. Despite their personal commitment and the available technology, there are obstacles when trying to move to a proactive health model. Offering customer assistance through multichannel transactions can prevent customers switching to other options. In addition, keeping members informed of the progress so they don’t have to make a call improves loyalty and ultimately the bottom-line.
Summary
The focus your healthcare organization staff is to collect the necessary information and improve patient satisfaction. A call center is an excellent way to handle this.
Call centers must deal with the continuing challenge of recruiting and training excellent personnel and attempting to increase retention rates. To improve service, management must constantly communicate with both employees and customers in an interactive, multidimensional process. In the global marketplace, improvement of service is not an option—it’s a matter of survival. A call center can help.
Bronson Tang is the marketing manager at Pulsar360, Inc. He has ten years of experience in digital marketing and has worked in the telecommunications sector for four years. He is the author of the book, The Tao of Business. Pulsar360, Inc., with origins dating back to 2001, is an established Unified-Communication-as-a-Service (UCaaS) provider with a comprehensive set of offerings it has provided to over 160 medical centric call centers including: cloud-based enterprise-class call center IP PBX; premise-based IP PBX, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-trunking, business continuity disaster recovery solutions, T38 Faxing that meets HIPAA, GLBA, and other industry compliance regulations and carrier services.