In the healthcare industry, three main goals stand out: improving efficiency, ensuring reliability, and reducing costs. These objectives are essential, particularly for medical billing services, which face unique challenges within the healthcare system.
A 2009 study by Stephen Parente estimated that 30-40% of medical bills, except pharmacy bills, contained errors.
Outsourcing is an effective, efficient, and cost-saving way to improve healthcare operations and enhance patient experience, helping healthcare providers issue accurate and timely information while improving their own procedures and increasing productivity and revenue.
This article will explore the role of healthcare call center outsourcing and the key benefits for providers and patients.
What is Healthcare Call Center Outsourcing
Healthcare call center outsourcing is primarily shifting your day-to-day functions and tasks to an outsourcing company. It has become a popular solution in the healthcare industry over the past few years, especially for providers struggling to manage daily operations. Partnering with third-party agencies can bring many benefits, including increased efficiency, reduced costs, and improved patient satisfaction. By delegating non-patient care tasks to the experts, healthcare providers reduce the administrative load and can focus on their core duty of providing optimal patient care.
In addition to managing patient interactions and backend operations, outsourcing helps healthcare providers improve their data management systems. Data entry and record management are critical components of healthcare operations, and outsourcing these tasks can free up in-house staff to focus on more complex duties. Moreover, outsourcing billing, payment dues handling, medical device support, and other functions enables providers to stay up-to-date with the latest technological advances and billing requirements.
The primary objectives of outsourcing are to elevate member, provider, and patient satisfaction, smooth operations, and drive down costs. By eliminating the requirement for extensive in-house teams, providers acquire substantial savings.
Types of Outsourced Healthcare Services
Healthcare call center services cover a broad spectrum of support structured to assist healthcare providers in several areas. Here's a rundown of the services:
1. Member and Patient Experience
A critical component of the healthcare service framework, this service includes patient scheduling, ongoing patient engagement, post-visit follow-ups, and online and remote billing. Agents are also trained to conduct enrollment benefits support, policy administration, claims support, and pharmacy fulfillment and administration. These tailored services can improve patient experience and simplify administrative tasks for healthcare providers.
2. Payor and Provider Services
A crucial pillar in healthcare's administrative and financial aspects, these services cater to areas like prior authorization, insurance verification, claims and billing, data quality/data entry, and comprehensive records management. Furthermore, outsourcing providers facilitate efficient provider credentialing, care, and utilization management. The services also help companies navigate the often complex regulatory and compliance programs as well as provide essential enrollment and welcome season support, ensuring seamless interactions for new members.
3. Health and Care Management
These call center services are focused on contributing to sales and subscriber growth; user onboarding and engagement; technical and medical device support; medical data entry, capture, and tagging, and community moderation. In addition, outsourcers use advanced analytics, helping healthcare providers make strategic, data-driven decisions to improve care quality and patient satisfaction.
4. Virtual Assistant and Chatbots
In this digital age, virtual assistants and chatbots offer an innovative solution to customer service management. Healthcare call centers offer AI-powered services that are available around the clock and in various channels. The responsiveness enhances the patient experience and significantly reduces the workload for healthcare professionals.
5. Medical Imaging
Outsourcers offer invaluable support in labeling medical imagery, helping healthcare providers navigate through extensive volumes of medical images. They have professionals who accurately label X-rays, MRIs, CT scans, PET scans, cytology and histopathology slides, and electronic health records (EHRs), which can be transformed into an actionable and insightful database for healthcare providers.
6. Robotics Training
The future of healthcare lies in the integration of advanced technologies. Outsourcers have the resources and expertise in training medical programs to become autonomous, make real-time decisions, and navigate dynamic environments while reducing the risk of errors in healthcare delivery.
7. Data Enrichment
Accurate data entry and organized maintenance of EHRs are essential in any healthcare setting. Outsourced call centers provide proficient management, classification, and categorization of patient records, contributing to improved healthcare delivery and decision-making.
Healthcare providers can opt for a personalized service plan fitting their specific needs, underlining the adaptability and significant advantage of outsourcing.
Why Outsource Healthcare Call Center Services
There is a multitude of reasons why healthcare providers should consider outsourcing billing and other non-core functions that will benefit both the brand and its customers over the mid- and long-term:
1. Enhanced efficiency
Outsourced services provide 24/7 support. This grants healthcare providers the luxury of uninterrupted services for their patients without the necessity of managing an in-house team around the clock. Not only does this ensure that members' and patients' questions and concerns are addressed at any time, but it also frees up significant resources and time for healthcare providers.
2. Cost-effectiveness
The financial benefits of outsourcing could be substantial. Maintaining an in-house call center involves a hefty overhead cost of hiring, training, and managing the staff, setting up and maintaining infrastructure, and ensuring compliance with increasingly stringent healthcare regulations. An outsourcing partner reduces these costs, creating a more profitable and leaner operation.
3. Industry best practices
Outsourcing partners follow industry best practices and bring on board their comprehensive experience and understanding of healthcare processes, including data security. This expertise leads to fewer errors, improved patient satisfaction, and higher efficiency.
4. Time and resource reallocation for patient care
Outsourcing companies handle billing services and other administrative processes like scheduling, data entry, and customer service tasks like medical device support. Delegating these workflows allows healthcare providers to focus on core competencies and frees up time and resources for member and patient care, ensuring a higher standard of service and enhanced experiences.
5. Scalability
As a healthcare provider grows, so does the volume of interactions. Outsourcing companies easily adapt to these fluctuations, providing scalability that's hard to match with an in-house team. Healthcare providers can easily adjust the services they receive based on their current needs, adding or reducing support as required.
According to a 2019 study by Black Book Research on over 500 hospitals and in-patient organizations, 80% reported service levels exceeded expectations from outsourcing hospital processes to expert partners.
How TaskUs can help
In the ever-changing healthcare landscape, having the right outsourcing partner is crucial for success. TaskUs is an expert in providing end-to-end solutions that help healthcare providers navigate this complex field, meet customer expectations, and grow at a desired scale. We work closely with our clients to understand their specific needs and pain points and develop customized solutions that align with their goals.
Our comprehensive healthcare solutions include open enrollment support, telemedicine support, customer service, billing and coding services, data entry and verification, patient scheduling and reminders, medical device support, claims processing, and digital transformation. We also offer thorough data analytics and insights to help our clients make informed decisions. In addition, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance is another domain that TaskUs has expertise in, as we have attained third-party attestation of HIPAA compliance for campaign-specific requirements.
As an example, we assisted a healthcare provider in dealing with the increased demand on their call center caused by COVID-19. We launched their program within three weeks and took care of all aspects of call center management, including scheduling appointments and triaging patient needs. This allowed the client to concentrate on delivering exceptional patient care while we dealt with the intricacies of managing their call center. TaskUs delivered the following results:
- Doubled conversion rate
- Increased patients per appointment
- Increased revenue for the client by 50% per visit
- Improved workflow for patient safety
By offloading the operational weight to Us, you can focus on your prime objective: delivering high-quality care.
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