Is BPO The Solution To Patient Contact Center Modernization?
By Anand Natampalli, vice president, global business development, HGS
Contact centers were created to manage many of the administrative tasks associated with patient management, such as scheduling or re-scheduling appointments, accessing lab results or referral requests. This system allowed patients to engage with their provider organization without adversely impacting the top-of-license work of clinicians.
In era of healthcare consumerism, however, more patients are expecting a level of sophistication and customization that most “analog” contact centers cannot meet. More often than not, consumers of your healthcare services are met with confusing phone directories, difficult-to-navigate-websites, and contact representatives who may not have the training or resources to make a patient encounter meaningful and productive.
Evidence abounds that hospitals and health systems have made considerable investments in patient-centered care and experience. However, the contact center — the virtual, and sometimes literal, front door for many patients — seems to have been left behind.
This neglect represents a critical missed opportunity for provider organizations of all sizes. Patient access centers are legitimate business departments and have an important role to play in the transition to value-based, patient-centric care. They have the potential to create new streams of revenue. They engender patient loyalty to your brand. Most importantly, access centers are a critical first impression that ultimately determines whether a patient chooses to purchase your healthcare services.
While some organizations may automatically consider in-house solutions for contact center modernization, business process outsourcing (BPO) offers many unique solutions for growing organizations.
In a patient-centric healthcare economy, BPO offers the right balance of technology and talent for seamless patient experience delivery. Services that address traditional contact center operations, automation and self-service, complemented by trained support staff can better align a contact center with the mission and vision of the entire organization.
The ‘New’ BPO
BPO is popularly thought of as a tactical service that simply transfers in-house work to lower-cost geographies. While this may have been accurate in the past, today’s BPO partners are leveraged more for strategic innovation. Rather than focusing exclusively on lower costs, a BPO partnership can help provider organization improve contact center processes through a mix of technology services, such as IVR and automation; staff specifically trained in delivering consumer experience services (something usually outside of the normal, clinically-focused scope of hospitals and health systems); and benchmarking and improvement processes through the use of data analytics.
Improving The Patient Experience
One of the most critical areas where BPO can contribute is in helping provider organizations improve the patient experience. Until recently, patient contact care primarily consisted of answering phone calls or emails around basic questions during normal business hours.
However, the modern healthcare consumer has more choices than ever before, and is seeking long-term relationships with their providers. Today, after years of being provide exceptional experience within other industries, patients expect far more, such as 24x7x365 availability.
The model patient contact center should drive revenue and patient satisfaction; reduce no-shows and time spent by caregivers on reaching patients; and eliminate the need for patients to fish around for answers to their questions. The goal of contact centers should be to make the patient experience as easy as possible through both personalization and self-service—striving for that perfect balance between automation and a live, human-touch interaction.
The trick for health systems is finding an efficient and cost-effective way of properly routing inbound calls using an intelligent, data-accessible system and determining patient communication preferences for outbound contacts. Patients want the ability to obtain answers however they prefer – by phone, email, text, online chat, self-service web portal—or a seamless combination of these methods.
BPO partners can help payers revamp and improve the patient care services quickly, so they can meet and exceed consumer-based expectations while incurring minimal cost impacts.
Additional Advantages
Other areas where BPO partners can help provider organizations meet the rising tide of consumerization include:
- Scalability. Even if provider organizations have strategies to accommodate operational growth, they may not be able to scale efficiently to meet growing demand. A BPO partner can assist with ramping up needs on either a temporary or permanent basis.
- Process optimization. An experienced BPO partner will examine all the options to determine the best course of action. This may mean eliminating or revising a contact center process rather than simply applying technology to make an inefficient process somewhat more efficient. It’s about the ability to ensure that the contact center doesn’t just get “better,” but that it does so in a way that meets patient expectations.
- Capability enhancement. A good BPO organization can bring new knowledge of skills to an organization immediately, with limited lead time, helping hospitals meet current and long-term goals in a way that improves operations and patient satisfaction.
- Staff Expertise. As BPO services become increasingly complex and the range of potential support needs are both expansive and rapidly changing, it isn’t practical to try to train every person in an enterprise on every nuance or possible circumstance. Knowledge management is increasingly important. Today’s knowledge platforms are at the center of digital support strategies to optimize the patient experience with unified customer engagement.
Conclusion
Providers have traditionally preferred to keep a business operation like the patient contact center in-house. But in a rapidly changing, patient-centric world, that simply may not be an option in every situation. Today, BPO partners are taking an active role in helping provider organizations manage change, internally and externally, to put themselves in a better position to take advantage of the opportunities to be found by optimizing patient experience journeys. By selecting the right partner, hospitals and health systems can position themselves to gain a competitive advantage in the present while setting themselves up for an even brighter future.
About The Author
Anand Natampalli is vice president, global business development, for HGS, a provider of end-to-end business process services for numerous Fortune 100 health insurance companies and large provider organizations.