Treat Your Patients Better with Fewer Resources and More Billable Hours
Running a healthcare practice is a complicated process that involves constantly balancing patient’s care with the income of your practice. In a perfect world physicians could spend as much time with their patients as needed and wouldn’t have to waste time with clerical projects and accounting duties. What many practices don’t realize is that this dream is closer to a reality than they realize.
Stop answering inbound phone calls
Many healthcare practices wouldn’t think of turning their inbound phone calls over to a call center, but that’s because they believe the only option is a generic answering service that does nothing but answer calls and transfer them. It’s understandable that these services won’t cut it: they do nothing to improve the patient-doctor relationship.
The good news is that there are call centers that specialize in the healthcare industry and are trained to know exactly how to deal with your patients. With healthcare bpo, trained professionals answer the phones promptly every time, and not only understand how to provide exceptional customer service, but they understand the details of your practice and the services that you offer.
Leave sales to those who excel in it
As a medical practice, it’s likely that your marketing plan doesn’t involve cold calling prospective patients, but your staff should be up-selling and cross-selling. This often doesn’t happen the way it should for a number of reasons:
· Receptionists and other front desk staff are not well-versed in soft sales techniques
· Those who aren’t naturally adept at sales find it awkward or uncomfortable, and it shows!
· The focus of your internal staff is on the client’s needs — which is exactly where it should be
When you decide to switch to business process outsourcing (BPO) services, your staff no longer has to worry about these sometimes uncomfortable sales tactics — no matter how soft said sales tactics may be. Instead, they can focus on one thing and one thing only: creating the best possible experience for your patients.
Focus on giving the type of care you’ve always wanted to give
Many men and women who go into the field of medicine do so with grand expectations. They think only of meeting new patients, earning their trust, and treating them for years to come. They imagine the satisfaction of taking the time to really hear their patients and understand what issues they’re having. While these are lofty goals, soon after physicians start their own practice, they learn that this dream is just that — a dream. It’s unattainable in today’s world. Or so it may seem.
What keeps physicians from giving their clients undivided, personal attention is a lack of time and resources. What physicians learn quickly after leaving their residency and working with their own patients is that their job is only partially about helping people. Half of their time is taken up with administrative tasks, marketing materials, and other duties that they simply don’t excel at. The simple way to get out from under this trap is to turn to a BPO provider.
Increase billable hours by reducing time spent on administrative tasks
Patient care is important but you can’t properly care for patients if your practice isn’t thriving. This is crux of the problem: how does a company increase their billable hours without reducing patient care? As discussed throughout this article, the answer is simple — outsource administrative tasks to the professionals.
You only have so many hours in a week. As a physician, you could increase the hours you spend with patients only by either increasing the hours you work or by outsourcing your billing, collections, inbound calls, appointment setting and sales to a company that’s only job is to handle these tasks in the best, most cost-effective, and most efficient way. This will finally give your patients what they really want: more time with their doctor.
