Over the past decade, patients have become increasingly demanding with their healthcare service requirements. Healthcare providers have been forced to find new ways to improve patient care and satisfaction without adding to their expenses. At the same time, they have also had to find new time-saving ways of improving patient engagements without adding to the existing burden of their care teams. And although this has been quite challenging, there is a solution that offers incredible convenience – Healthcare BPO Services.
In fact, medical BPO services have helped alleviate the burden of healthcare providers by taking over non-core healthcare functionalities. As a result, healthcare providers can now solely focus on their primary responsibilities – offering premium patient care! They can dedicate all of their valuable resources towards improving the quality of medical treatment to their patients. In the meantime, medical BPO services will take care of their customer support and patient engagement necessities. Through specialized healthcare customer support, patients can now enjoy superior experiences with their healthcare providers.
What Do The Statistics Have To Say?
Recent studies have shown that patient engagement has become a necessity in the current healthcare landscape. They help set and manage the expectations of patients while also strengthening the relationship between healthcare providers and their customers. Let’s look at some relevant statistics.
- According to a study in 2015, close to 50 percent of patients experience limited medical literacy. They expect appropriate explanations and accurate health information about their conditions and treatments.
- On average, healthcare providers spend at least 1.5 to 3 hours every day with patients. This includes outgoing calls for patient outreach functions as well as incoming patient inquiries and complaints. That is a lot of time spent on non-billable interactions, which can be better utilized on billable healthcare activities.
- Most patients have felt the need to contact the healthcare provider after being discharged for more information on their health and other medical data. More than 50 percent of patients feel that post-discharge follow-ups would reduce their need for re-admissions.
Hence, patient engagement has become a critical aspect of modern healthcare services, providing enriched and satisfactory patient experiences.
How Can Healthcare BPO Services Help Your Healthcare Business Offer Better Patient Engagements?
Top Healthcare BPO companies design their Healthcare Call Center Services to deliver satisfactory patient interactions. These services include a myriad of customer support functions such as:
- Handling patient inquiries
- Resolving customer complaints
- Offering billing support
- Scheduling & monitoring physician appointments
- Verifying insurance information & processing claims
- Conducting patient outreach programs and awareness campaigns
- Organizing post-discharge surveys and follow-ups
These services can have a massive impact on your patient engagements. They will determine the kind of customer support you are able to offer to your patients. They will also determine the overall experience that patients have with your business. While medical treatments are obviously important for their health, Healthcare Call Center Services can make the experience convenient and satisfactory for them. This kind of satisfactory experience will help you build strong customer loyalty among your patients.
In addition, healthcare BPO companies specialize in patient interactions. Owing to the sensitive nature of their health conditions, your patients and their families expect their interactions to be professional yet empathetic. This allows them to process the information better and still have the mental stability to make appropriate health decisions. Having such empathetic patient interactions requires training and professional conversational skills. Your care team members are specialist patient caregivers. However, they may not be proficient in patient communication.
This is where the professionally-trained healthcare contact center executives can be incredibly effective. Using a professional approach, they can have empathetic patient engagements and ensure that patients feel comfortable during the interaction.
The Professional Approach Of Healthcare BPO Services Is Particularly Effective For COVID-19 Contact Tracing
If your healthcare operations include or require COVID-19 contact tracing services, Healthcare BPO companies can be of great help. Unfortunately, contact tracers face many setbacks in their efforts as people are not comfortable enough to open up to them. Given the sensitivity surrounding the subject, people are reluctant to share information and contact details of close “contacts”. However, healthcare contact center executives are aware of how to soothe COVID-affected patients and make them comfortable. Once the patients are comfortable, they cooperate with the contact tracers from the healthcare BPO company and provide all necessary information.
In addition, healthcare BPO companies provide many services that complement the initial purpose of Contact Tracing – tracking down all COVID-affected people. These services include:
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Quarantine support & self-isolation guidelines for the COVID-affected patients
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Symptom monitoring and health alerts
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Vaccination scheduling and timely reminders
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COVID-related medical data accumulation & analysis for healthcare providers
With access to this data, you can significantly improve the efficiency of your healthcare operations. In addition, the professional COVID-19 contact tracing services of a healthcare BPO company will also help you offer better COVID-care to your patients and improve their overall health. As the current global pandemic continues to torment people of all genders and ages, your healthcare business needs to continue to improve all COVID-related services. This will not only help you to offer better patient care to your customers but also bring in additional revenues to your coffers. As the quality of your COVID-care improves, more and more patients will prefer your brand as their preferred healthcare provider.
With an increase in your customers, you will also need to scale your patient support offerings. Your partnership with a professional healthcare BPO company will help you seamlessly scale your patient support offerings. In addition, you can also maintain incredible consistency with patient support offerings and deliver superior experiences to all your patients.
Positive Patient Engagements Is Set To Drive The Healthcare Industry In Future
Although your patients may not have great medical literacy, they expect to be told about their conditions and treatments. Gone are the days when patients blindly followed instructions and were satisfied with whatever treatments were offered to them. Instead, the modern customer expects comprehensive healthcare services, including non-medical patient support. This is why Healthcare BPO Services have become indispensable in the current healthcare landscape. With every healthcare provider fighting for their share of the market, positive patient engagements have the power to propel your business to the forefront.
State-of-the-art machinery and the latest technological advancements continue to shape the present and future of medical treatments. However, patient support functions are set to gain significant importance in the healthcare industry in the near future. Customers have already begun to assess healthcare providers based on their patient support offerings when comparing multiple service providers. As a result, healthcare services providers have already begun to modify their service offerings to offer better patient engagements. In the coming years, patient engagements are set to enjoy even more prominence and will remain a major factor driving the healthcare industry.
Conclusion
As a healthcare services provider, medical treatments need to be your foremost priority. However, you cannot neglect patient support functions in an effort to provide better medical care. Healthcare BPO Services allows you to offer top-quality patient support without dedicating many resources to your patient support functions. They also allow you to focus more on medical advancements while they deal with all patient communications. Their professional yet empathetic approach helps your patients enjoy superior patient experiences.