Do you believe that sixty percent of hospitals complain about the poor EHR customer support? Is it apt to think if such phenomenon impacts patient care? In fact, most of the hospitals are undertaking several transformations of their EHR customer support functions. Poor support quality and results are even worse compared to previous year’s results.
What could be the reasons for such inferior customer service? It’s important for hospitals to take certain steps to receive their expected results. At the same time EHR customer support companies or vendors are simultaneously counting on bigger customer experiences but not succeeding to provide an average support.
Hospital’s IT department prefers EHR vendors to provide customer support internally or by outsourcing. In the absence of EHR vendors, hospitals are ready to go for outsourcing customer services. The plan has worked in few cases but not in most. Almost eighty percent of clinicians report that patient care is being disturbed due to dis-satisfied EHR customer service.
Why is excellent EHR customer support so important?
- Unfortunately, hospitals have been facing many obstacles those often point the finger towards EHR support, vendors or outsourcing operations or overall technical business model.
- It results in failure of many collaborations and partnerships or destined to revive from the scratch.
- Few hospitals outsource EHR customer support that has no experience working with healthcare professionals as well as hospitals. It’s considered to the worst support as healthcare industry is different compared to other industries.
- The challenges confronted by healthcare professional’s or hospital’s service desks are unique and it requires highly qualified professionals to handle the patient care timelines and 24/7 access to hospital queries with a need for HIPAA compliance.
- The other cause can be that EHR vendors or customer support fails to complete necessary, highly intensive due diligence on hospital’s most expected operations prior to transitions.
- Services might get delayed suddenly and very soon the results and response for the overall services fall down to the lowest point.
- Including EHR vendors and also outsourcing companies, it’s necessary to not only have experience analysts but also additional training programs are required as these vary to large extent in quality and frequency which remains a big problem for hospitals along with ever changing systems and procedures.
- Most of the hospitals accept for EHR customer support provided by vendors those aren’t tailored to the hospital’s unique organizations’ requirements.
- Firms like these tend to offer only limited services those interrupt the process and the attention from users and services they seek.
- The above scenarios are common as the EHR customer support vendors only accept or show interest in resolving EHR related issues and other firms or outsourcing company’s hardware, software and few hospital’s applications.
- Bad network issues are very frequently supported by the internal staff as the outsourcing EHR customer support services won’t have necessary monitoring capabilities.
- Companies those are purely tier based often fail to meet the expectations of high speed clinical system support to healthcare professionals and other physicians.
- There’s urgency for hospitals or healthcare professionals to adopt one stop solution that includes issues with EHR usage. They don’t actually support the time required to explain the problem. Analyst with minimum knowledge on system should hand over the ticket to others with good experience in EHR customer support.
- Even if the EHR customer support is experienced but not highly proficient in work, hospitals must not compromise in changing the EHR vendor or the outsourcing company.
Why is Clinical Service Desk important?
- Hospitals’ IT support companies are mostly involved to provide clinical service desk to resolve the problems faced by hospitals.
- It particularly focuses on the finding solutions for clinically oriented issues.
- Clinical service desk is specially designed for healthcare professionals and clinicians to get solutions for their issues in the first place.
- Healthcare professionals need not wait for getting answered and doesn’t have to undergo trials for days or sometimes months.
- There are certain analysts trained to be experts in hospitals infrastructure and clinical functions and have already trained and worked with EHR customer support teams. Moreover they are also trained to take care of IT, network and resolve desktop related issues.
- Hospitals and healthcare professionals are given an opportunity to call them directly regarding any queries and get a quick turnaround time on all their clinical concerns.
- The EHR customer support and clinical desk service are ought to use sophisticated monitoring systems those proactively will uncover issues in real time.
- So, analysts will be able to resolve any issues before a call is received from hospitals or healthcare professionals. It further helps to anticipate and prepare for potential calls.
- If the hospitals are not satisfied with present EHR customer support and hesitates to move or shift for the new one, it becomes a huge loss for the business.
- Hospitals will have to search for the third party outsourcing and also check for the better EHR customer service than the unsatisfied performance from the present team.
- Usually a decreasing number of hospitals will actually rely on the in house support which actually increases the complexity and makes it even harder for in house team to manage.
- Especially in small and medium practices very few expertise manage all of the in house tasks and needs which is a huge burden on meeting the greatest benefits.
- As hospitals and healthcare professionals are evolving to enhance themselves it’s very important to have a successful EHR support team to meet their all-time necessities and follow the growth of revenue.
Top Qualities of Customer Support Representatives
Customer support reps are the true heroes in a business. They need to be adept with the current functions and navigate through different departments and their workflows to find the best possible solution in the least possible time. Here are some qualities that they must possess:
- A positive attitude in your voice tone can take you a long way. It is increasingly becoming difficult for hospitals to focus on in-house teams to take care of the matter. Therefore they are depending more on outsourced customer support teams. With the right training and years of experience, they know how to take the matter with a positive outlook.
- Communication skills need to be top-notch for any customer support executive. The goal is to close the issue before it goes to your supervisor. Delays in EHR service lead to complexities in the workflow for the providers, which ultimately results in loss of revenue.
- EHR customer support reps need to learn and be fluent in handling the several issues. If they are not meant to handle a specific query then they should not waste time and immediately pass it on to the correct department. They need to juggle between specific EHR issues and other software and hardware issues as well.
- Queries at EHR customer desk can range from anything like incorrect hospital applications to wrongly filled documentation. Customer support executives must know how to navigate between these issues and resolve the problems in the best possible way.
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