If you have had to call a doctor or hospital recently, you may have noticed that many of them now have contact centers, similar to those used by businesses for customer service. At first, this may seem a bit bewildering and confusing, if you thought you could reach a given person you have spoken to before directly as you might have done in the past by calling and talking to a receptionist. However, the rise in the use of contact centers by healthcare facilities actually provides a lot of benefits to patients, and could well be ensuring you get better care. Here we look at what the advantages of handling patient calls in this way are both for the healthcare providers, and for you:

Efficiency

Hospitals and doctors’ offices can be quite hectic places, and it isn’t always easy or even possible for the people on the ground there to efficiently respond to incoming calls. Because contact centers specialize in doing just that, they have processes and quality assurance protocols in place to make sure that every patient is dealt with promptly and efficiently. This guarantees that you will get the action you need when you call, and will result in far less frustration when you are trying to contact a healthcare establishment about an important health matter or make an appointment.

Quality of Service

Some hospitals and other healthcare facilities have in house contact centers that they staff themselves, others use companies that specialize in providing healthcare call center personnel, and fit the contact center they create around the hospital’s processes and needs, like Ameridial’s healthcare services. Whichever option a healthcare provider chooses for their contact center, the staff who man the phones will have specialist training and industry knowledge, so they will be able to give patients a high quality service. Where required, they will be fully trained in the financial aspects of healthcare too, so will be able to answer questions around things like insurance and Medicaid. Contact centers can also monitor calls and do quality control just like customer service call centers do, helping ensure a consistent and compliant service on each call.

Better Customer Support

Healthcare call centers are trained to treat you as a customer as well as a patient, and one of their objectives is to provide customer satisfaction. They will aim to ensure your call is resolved and you leave the call with the outcome that you wanted, or the information you needed. This is their role within the healthcare organization that they work for, so they are able to dedicate all their attention to you, and give you what you need when you are speaking to them – something it is not always possible for staff like receptionists at healthcare facilities to do while they are in demanding environments.

When you look at the improvements in service and satisfaction that healthcare organizations can make by routing incoming calls to a contact center, it is clear that the benefits are as much for the patient as for the facility.