Are your patients satisfied with your services? How long do you take to serve your patients? After all, a vast majority of healthcare professionals spend time on their other administration services. Some of them who are on outsourcing medical billing seem to have spent much more time during their patient encounter. A long waiting time for the patient isn’t good and it can bring down the business.
Patient experience is an important factor when it comes to healthcare professionals’ survival in the healthcare industry. While it’s true that at least a modicum of wait time is expected when patients visit your office, why not take advantage of that time to engage with your patients? It surely looks like a good idea, but how do you bring it into practice? When healthcare professionals and staff are engaged with patients and barely have time for other billing works, why not think of outsourcing medical billing services to a third party? If you have not thought it before, better think now!
Duties of Outsourcing medical billing services:
- Most of the healthcare practices own their medical billing and coding services where they have very less time to engage with their patients.
- By outsourcing medical billing services to professional healthcare billing companies, healthcare professionals find their patient management improving. Their staff will have more time to devote to other parts of the practice that will improve the patients’ experience as well as healthcare professional’s bottom line.
- With several years of experience in assisting healthcare practices in medical billing areas, outsourcing medical billing can actually help develop a plan that will enable professionals to provide patient engagement that’s focused, helpful, and satisfying.
- Even the smallest attempt at patient engagement will improve the quality of their experience and the practice management. This also helps patient retention and increases profitability.
5 ways to improve patient experience
Patient Comfort:
- Most of the healthcare practices consider this as an afterthought and it shows in their work. Yet, this is what patients will notice later, when their friends and family ask about their experience with professionals.
- They don’t have to go too far. It is the simple things that are actually required. For example, be sure to keep a variety of magazines in a wide range of genres so people always have something to read and get occupied with.
- Television and WIFI access are the most mandatory things in the current scenario. They drive out the boredom and let the patient catch up with something or the other.
Patient Education:
- Patients are busy, so it’s important to provide pamphlets or brochures reminding them of how to take care of themselves when dealing with a specific condition or current pandemic with preventative steps that could protect themselves from future health problems.
- Examples include:
- Healthcare professionals must provide reminders of how to protect against Covid-19.
- They can also provide information on the dangers and myths of Covid-19 and what happens if we don’t act right.
- This not only provides value and knowledge but also subtly motivates them to be proactive in their own behaviour.
Patient information:
- It’s another overlooked idea whereas it shouldn’t be. You must consider the times realized after a patient left the office or after he/she submitted a claim that healthcare professional didn’t have the correct or updated information for.
- Patient’s contact numbers are not constant. They keep on changing them frequently. So use this opportunity to update a patient’s address, phone number, email address, and insurance information. While the patients wait, healthcare professional might offer them a chance to review or update their information.
Patient Feedback:
- This can be really valuable. But at the same time healthcare providers will have to be ready to receive criticism as well as respond to patient feedback. Perhaps allow the patients to fill out a survey or maybe allow them the chance to drop feedback in a suggestion box.
- Healthcare professionals must be ready for this though. While outsourcing medical billing services, patient information will be checked thoroughly and there would be nothing the professional have to be afraid of.
- Patient feedback won’t bother professionals anymore, only if the services are outsourced to medical billing companies.
Patient Questions:
- Patients will have huge number of questions to ask healthcare providers. It can be related to health or other billing or payments.
- So, be prepared to help them if they have questions such as the following:
- Outstanding balances
- Financial assistance
- HSAs (tax-deductible health savings accounts)
- Treatment plan schedule
Benefits of outsourcing medical billing:
- Well, deciding to outsourcing medical billing services to third party or healthcare billing companies isn’t an easy task, especially if you’ve never done it before or haven’t even considered it until now.
- Apparently, there are numerous benefits that will improve and enhance patient engagement as well as practice management.
- Few more benefits are mentioned below:
- Reduced testing and diagnostic costs
- Fewer elective surgeries
- Patients more likely to better follow prescribed treatments
- Greater patient satisfaction
- Better patient knowledge and understanding of their health
- Patients make more, positive health-related behavior changes
- More transparency, which leads to a higher level of trust
- When the relationship between healthcare providers and their patients is strong, it might lead to more patient compliance, earlier detection of disease, reduction in costs, and better clinical outcomes.
- For such kind of relationship to exist and sustain, one of the contributing factors is what patients experience at healthcare professional’s office. A positive end-to-end experience is necessary and essential if providers need to develop a relationship with patients lasting over the long term.
- Five more steps will ensure better patient experience. They are:
- Creating a patient friendly website
- Having a well-managed appointment scheduling system
- Making the healthcare practice welcoming
- Sending appointment confirmations and reminders
- Having regular follow up after every visit
- These steps might help the professional to ensure better patient experience. But to let this relationship continue without any revenue halt, outsourcing medical billing is very apt and essential at this point of time. It reduces the billing burden and lets professionals concentrate on patients most of the time.
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