7 Best Practices to Transform your Healthcare Call Center in the USA
For most healthcare companies, their call center is the first line of defense when it comes to asking questions about patients and solving any problems that patients may face. Patients who often call their healthcare providers rely on an agent on the other end of the line. Any negative interactions can easily send the patients into the hands of a competing healthcare provider.
That is why it is crucial that a healthcare call center in the USA operate efficiently and provide top-notch services. To help you get started, here is a compiled this list of best practices for a healthcare call center in the USA.
1. Follow HIPAA safety protocols carefully
For healthcare professionals, violating the Health Insurance Portability and Liability Act (HIPAA) can be costly – and not just financial. In addition to the severe penalties, violating HIPAA can cost you the trust of patients, damage your organization’s reputation, and even lead you to jail.
At the highest risk, you cannot afford not to comply with HIPAA, which means you must do everything in your power to make sure that electronic personal health information (PHI) is kept safe, including any PHI collected during call center interactions.
To ensure secure patient-provider interaction in your healthcare call center:
- Only allow authorized users to access your private communications network;
- Encrypt all communications according to NIST standards; and
- Implement lifespan of messages that deletes PHI from an authorized user’s computer after a certain period of time
Regarding the last item, be careful not to completely eliminate the PHI; the first members are required to keep the documentation for six years or more, depending on state-specific regulations.
2. Hire fair people
Finding good help can be difficult, but it’s worth it. If you are looking for talent, look for agents with previous expertise and experience in a healthcare call center, as they are more likely to have completed HIPAA training. Arrange the interview process to test candidates’ real-life scenarios to ensure that candidates have everything they need to respond calmly and compassionately, even under the highest levels of stress. If you do not have time for interviews with individual candidates, consider outsourcing to a medical BPO services company. In both cases, the more informed your agents are, the more likely your organization is to remain in compliance with HIPAA.
3. Provides multichannel, multilingual patient support
Patients come from every walks of life and environment, which means you need a medical call center team that can adapt to different client segments. Consider hiring multilingual agents so that patients can communicate in the language that is most convenient for them. It is also important that you provide patients with several ways to reach them, including e-mail, live chat, text messaging, and social media, and that you each provide a consistent, high-quality experience.
4. Monitor and analyze healthcare call center metrics
However, when providing metrics and critical insight into the overall functioning of your healthcare call center in the USA, it’s important to know who to follow. To see how many important performance metrics you can keep from drowning in your data, start by focusing on the following metrics:
Average Response Time:
As the name suggests, this measure indicates how long it usually takes an agent to respond to a patient’s call. It is essential that agents try to answer the patient’s questions in a timely manner to avoid any unusual failure on the part of the patient.
Departure Frequency:
Indicates the speed at which patients hang up before connecting to an agent. As you can imagine, the bounce rate is closely related to the average response time. To calculate the vacation percentage, divide the number of calls remaining by the total number of calls received and multiply by a hundred. For example, if your Healthcare Call Center receives 1,000 calls and 100 are left, your vacation percentage will be 10%.
Average talk time:
This measurement is again relatively simple because it measures the average time patients spend on the line. This may include speaking time and administrative duties. The longer a patient is forced to wait on the phone call (or any form of communication he prefers), the more his precious time is wasted. Healthcare call center staff should try to resolve issues as quickly and efficiently as possible. To calculate the average call time in your call center, divide the total call time by the number of calls received. For example, if your representatives spent a total of 300 hours on the phone and received 600 calls during that time, their average talk time would be 30 minutes.
Customer Satisfaction:
This measure calculates how satisfied customers – in this case, patients – are with the overall performance of a healthcare call center in the USA. The easiest way to calculate customer satisfaction is to ask patients for feedback, usually in the form of a survey. To calculate your call center satisfaction rate, divide the number of positive answers by the total number of answers and multiply by 100. For example, if you get 300 hundred positive answers out of 400 total answers, your customer satisfaction level will be 75%.
5. Always be nice
Patients do not contact healthcare centers because they want to but because they have to – often because of an urgent medical problem. As a result, they are already under considerable stress, and the last thing they need is a bad experience with a call center agent. Teach your agents to be patient, attentive, and, most importantly, empathetic as you help solve the problems your patients face. In a badly damaged industry, there is a bit of helpfulness.
6. Always say the right thing
How call center agents communicate with patients is as important as the information they communicate. Of course, agents are always expected to be professional, but they will gain more miles from each interaction by being careful with their meaning. Recommend the following to the contact center agents.
7. Avoid negative expressions
Find ways to turn a negative statement into a positive one. For example, if a patient calls to schedule a surgical consultation but the doctor’s calendar is full, instead of saying, “I’m sorry, but the doctor has nothing available this month,” the agent may say, “Next.” [Date]. I can go and book it for you. ” Instant reply is necessary when you answer phone calls for any healthcare purpose. As every patient calls when they are not good in terms of health, So, they expect instant and positive answer which can help them in terms of their needs
Be real:
Call scripts are not intended to be read literally; encourage agents to use language that they find organic (of course, if appropriate). By being honest with each other, agents can create a more relaxed atmosphere and build a stronger relationship with the patient.
Give specific instructions. Representatives should clearly state when patients need to take further action after the call and if so, provide specific instructions on how to proceed.
8. Make things easier for patients
Remember that at the end of the day, there are healthcare call centers in the USA to serve patients – especially to be happy and in good health – so it is important to remove as many obstacles as possible.
Technology is the ideal way to not only fill important service issues provided by your call center but also optimize the patient experience. For example, you can implement high-quality monitoring software to manage automated key metrics or artificially intelligent chatbots to reduce patient queries so that live agents can focus on more complex queries.
Finding the right solution to implement these and other best practices for a healthcare call center in the USA and transforming the patient experience can be a challenge, but a renowned BPO company can help.
Also medial BPO services provider in India are also an ideal choice if you are opting for customer support outsourcing and want cost-effective services for your healthcare business.