High Quality Patient Care Requires Dedicated Healthcare Scheduling Contact Centers

Most people who have set foot in a healthcare provider’s office recently will have noticed that staff spends a lot of time interfacing with their computers, often while simultaneously answering the phone and coping with billing. The result is often harried, overworked administrative personnel who make frequent mistakes. These mistakes are often expensive and require a lot of time to fix, not to mention frustrating for patients and caregivers.

With healthcare becoming increasingly complex, providers need to focus on patient care, and this means dedicated patient care staff. Healthcare organizations all over the country country are working to make their call centers and appointment scheduling processes more efficient, particularly when providers are located in multiple offices, or even different regions of the country. (Alternatively, they’re establishing or outsourcing to healthcare contact centers.) Scheduling, which takes the most administrative time, should ideally be a dedicated, shared process rather than a piecemeal effort.

A well-run healthcare contact center should employ “patient liaisons” who are able to see the full scope of appointment slots so they can efficiently schedule new appointments with a minimum of effort. Using a centralized appointment scheduling platform, agents could go a long way toward reducing the administrative time it takes to accomplish the most time-consuming tasks of patient administration. This has the advantage of freeing up in-office personnel to do more complex tasks onsite. Another bonus is that patients can call the contact center and schedule appointments outside of office hours…when they get home from work, for example.

Going forward, healthcare organizations will need these centralized scheduling solutions to maintain patient satisfaction and keep administrative costs down, according to a recent survey by Spok, as well as meet data security and patient privacy rules.

“As the sheer volume of communication rises, it’s no surprise that complexity increases as well,” wrote the report’s authors. “Regulatory considerations, increasing consolidation of healthcare entities, growing pressures for value-based care, the proliferation of technology, and a constantly mobile staff all add to the challenge of reliably connecting people with the critical information they need.”

Edited by Maurice Nagle