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Author: Jeff Tormey

12 Tips To Master Facebook For Medical Practices

12 Tips To Master Facebook For Medical Practices

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Other.

12 Tips To Master Facebook For Medical Practices

Patient engagement statistics reveal how much healthcare delivery has evolved to rely on technology and specifically social media.

Recent surveys have shown that 72% of patients are extremely satisfied when they know what to expect from a medical procedure and post-discharge follow-up calls reduce readmission by 50%. Medical staff members spend up to 2 hours a day calling patients and automating the process could yield better productivity. Enter social media, specifically Facebook. Facebook has 2.7 billion users globally as well as strategic integrations with other platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. These rank as the third, fourth, and fifth most popular social media platforms respectively. What is social media’s impact on the healthcare business and how can your practice capitalize on Facebook’s best marketing practices?

1. Share Video Content

Video is the most consumed content format online and generates 35% more organic impressions than static images.

Video is a great way to educate patients about what to expect when they come in and the various protocols in place. It can also create more engagement by showing the human element of your practice. Optimize for Facebook by
  • using square videos
  • Showing not telling to maximize on autoplay
  • Add captions

2. When Is Your Audience Online?

Facebook has developed a variety of analytics for businesses on its platform. These analytics tell you when is the best time to post on Facebook for maximum exposure. You can monitor when your audience is most active on Facebook and post at those times. In this way, Facebook can be a key component of your patient engagement solutions.

3. Tell Stories and Provoke Conversations

Posting advert after advert will quickly put off your audience. If you want your patients to respond to and share your content, engaging posts for Facebook are the way to go.

Images are more eye-catching and shareable than plain text posts. Facebook recommends having an accompanying image for all posts.

All images should be crisp, not blurry. They should be copyright-free or credited correctly. Pay close attention to the resolution requirements for Facebook.

4. Make Your Posts Actionable

Article links, newsletter signup forms, polls, and other call-to-action posts would feature regularly on your feed. They have higher engagement and can give extra value to your business by providing insights into your patients.

Though not all posts need to be actionable, a good amount should be.

5. Automate Posts and Responses

They also have scheduling and automation tools that can help your take advantage of these timelines even when you’re not awake.

You can set up automated responses on Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp for business to assist your patients on routine queries.

6. Consistency Is Key

Create a consistent posting schedule that will underscore your trustworthiness and authority.

As said, Facebook has scheduling tools to help with consistency. Alternatively, you can use third-party apps such as Buffer.

7. Partner With Related Businesses on Facebook

Other healthcare providers or professionals in the wellness space are great collaborators. Do live discussions or Q&As on each others’ pages. You’ll be able to piggyback on each other’s following and grow your reach organically.

8. Take Part in Community Development

Building a loyal online following has a crucial real-life component. People love to see their physicians be a part of and give back to the community.

If your practice can sponsor initiatives within the community, this is great. However, it can also be as simple as mentoring young people, food drives for the less fortunate, or sanitary packages for the homeless.

9. Periodic Targeted Ads and Offers

The beauty of Facebook ads is that you can target them so specifically, right down to the shows they like to watch and their hobbies. These targeted groups can be differentiated using more than 30 characteristics and behaviors. You can save each ad group and use it repeatedly.

It will work in your favor when offering specialized procedures such as facelifts or bariatric surgery which apply to very specific demographics

10. Simple and Cohesive Look and Tone

Don’t forget that your Facebook page is representing your brand. Stick to your brand colors and tone of voice throughout your posts Much as people enjoy seeing behind-the-scenes, keep it professional. It should not feel like a personal page. Facebook advises simple, clean creatives as the most attractive to users. Use minimal but impactful text.

11. Quick Responses and Reputation Management

The Facebook algorithm checks how quickly messages and queries are responded to. This period gets automatically added to your page.

A healthcare page that typically responds in 48 hours is not a good look. For queries not covered under the automated responses, have a schedule detailing the staff in charge of replying at various times. Assign each a signature or initials.

Negative reviews will occur from time to time especially if medical insurance verification was not done properly or there is a payment issue.

Responding to reviews helps boost your ranking and shows your patients that you care. You might need to take it to private direct messages for sensitive cases or request an offline conversation.

12. Take Advantage of Facebook Analytics

To round off these Facebook tips, remember to consistently evaluate the performance of your posts and ads. Insights on the Facebook admin page will let you know:
  • Which content had the most engagement
  • Who is visiting your page
  • How they are interacting with your posts

This crucial information will enable you to tweak your content marketing strategy to its most optimal.

Facebook can be a key part of your patient engagement and after-care. If done well it will expand your reach to new patients and create a solid online following.
10 Reasons to Hire a Doctor Marketing Agency

10 Reasons to Hire a Doctor Marketing Agency

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Other.

10 Reasons to Hire a Doctor Marketing Agency

Are you vacillating between hiring a healthcare marketing agency and a regular marketing firm? Medical marketing strategies are very specialized due to the sensitive and essential nature of medical services. Your medical practice needs a marketing partner specific to healthcare rather than a jack-of-all-trades agency. Here’s why.

1. Targeted Expertise in the Healthcare Market

Would you trust a doctor who claims to treat cancer, infant conditions, and horses? It would be absurd. Specialized fields such as medicine require marketing professionals who understand market insights and strategies that are targeted. High-level knowledge of the current healthcare ecosystem, the patient journey, and physician competition are necessary for successful medical marketing strategies. This expertise will enable the medical marketing agency to provide competitor analyses, effective marketing plans and to help navigate marketing efforts moving forward.

Read more : What Is a Healthcare Marketing Plan? Expert Tips and Strategies

3. Understanding Of Stark and HIPAA Laws

Medicine is a highly regulated field. This is to protect the privacy and safety of the patient and to protect physicians from exposing themselves to liability. Medical marketing consultants are conversant with the stipulations of these two laws. This means that any marketing plans they create and implement will not expose your practice to malpractice suits or legal violations.

3. Ease Of Communication With Physicians

The medical industry can get pretty technical in terms of language, operations, and protocols. Marketing agencies for doctors understand these technicalities and jargon. They can sufficiently represent and cater to your practice without inadvertently injuring your reputation. There is also the consideration that medical practitioners work outside the 9-5 framework. Any consulting agency needs to understand this and accommodate emergencies and unpredictable hours with ease.

4. Access to Medical Marketing Channels

Medical online marketing requires a unique approach. Not all marketing channels are appropriate or effective to medical practices.

  • Video Marketing
  • Digital advertising for medical practices
  • Engaging social media and referral marketing
  • Targeted email campaigns
  • Mobile marketing
  • Listings Management for Doctors
  • Physician Reputation Management
  • Medical SEO
  • Physician liaison marketing
  • Analytics and reporting

5. Budget-Conscious Marketing Strategy

Medicine is not like consumer goods or luxury industries that have huge marketing budgets. Revenue is tied up in expensive procedures, equipment, and reduced reimbursements. A medical marketing agency understands that they cannot afford to go over budget with their strategy. They need to make the allocated budgets work.

6. Reputation Recovery

Doctor marketing agencies understand that reputation management is key in a medical practice’s marketing strategy. Many bad reviews online result from dissatisfaction with treatment costs and the patient’s lack of understanding about their insurance coverage. Less favorable reviews online can wreak havoc on your business listing. An experienced marketing agency will know how to rescue these reviews and tip the balance to positive.

7. Prioritize Patient Referral Volume

Referrals of patients from other physician is a tried and tested way for a healthcare business to get new patients. A specialized marketing agency understands the importance of a physician liaison. This is the salesperson responsible for your system for doctor referral appointments. They make sure you’re getting referrals and that they are converting into appointments.

8. Building Patient Engagement

Long gone are the days of blindly firing off articles into the ether and hoping an interested customer bites the bait. Medical advertising agencies focus their digital marketing strategy on gaining the most patient engagement. Patients prefer direct engagement from their healthcare provider. They want dependable content that adds value. This, in turn, increases the reach of your brand and brings in new patients

Read more : Important Tools That Can Help You Improve Patient Engagement

9. Understand Patient Intake and Flow

Different elements play into the intake of patients and how they move from interest to appointment. A healthcare marketing firm needs to understand the ins and outs of all these elements to streamline and improve the experience for all. Experienced firms understand how crucial patient engagement solutions are to the patient journey. The solutions they implement will lead to a better experience, good reviews, and of course, new patients. These elements include:

  • Accurate business information online
  • Reviews and ratings
  • Effective scheduling and cancellation of appointments
  • New vs returning patient needs
  • Recurring visits vs one-off
  • High revenue procedures

10. Design and Patient Experience of Your Medical Website

83 percent of internet users are looking for medical information related to symptoms, treatment, and facilities.

What this means for healthcare marketing is that a physician’s or healthcare business’s website is like their digital front office.

A dedicated marketing agency understands this and the importance of UI (User interface) and UX (User experience). They will focus on giving your business a website that

  • Boosts engagement,
  • Increases traffic
  • Grows patient conversions
Medical Video Production

Why Hospitals & Practices Should Use Video: Reasons To Use Medical Video Production

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Manage.

Video-Enhanced Medical Interactions: A New Era of Expertise and Patient Engagement

Video, particularly online video, is one of the most popular ways that people consume content. YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Instagram, and now TikTok have hit it big with video and people from all walks of life are producing video for their viewers. Doctors have been using video to market their practices for years and the opportunity seems to keep growing.

Video has several advantages that make it a no-brainer for both marketing and patient education. So what is the importance of video production for healthcare practices and hospitals?

Reasons Why Hospitals Use Medical Video Production

Improve telehealth offerings.

Telehealth has been part of medicine for decades. However, it’s only recently that hospitals have been using video messaging and video content to improve their telehealth services. This article will be primarily focusing on the benefits of using video as an aid to telehealth.

Telehealth services can be limited because they require a doctor’s time. Having a patient watch informational videos before or after providing telehealth services can improve a patient’s level of engagement and better equip them to follow through with the prescribed treatment.

Provide patients with access to education.

Many doctor’s offices rely on pamphlets that a patient may or may not read. This form of education has largely been replaced with digital media formats such as PDFs and now, video.

Your patient portal can be used to host videos on various health topics that patients can use to take a more active role in their own healthcare. This can improve patient engagement, which in turn improves patient outcomes.

Video marketing can help grow a practice’s brand.

Because video is one of the most common ways people consume media, it goes without saying that using it for marketing represents a big opportunity. A hospital or practice that puts out quality video content can show the world that they are trustworthy, knowledgeable, and put the patient’s needs first.

Not only that, but having quality content out there on the Internet can improve your hospital or practice’s overall reach. People who would have otherwise never known about your brand are now exposed to it, and if the content helps them, their exposure to your brand will be a positive one.

Video is a core part of medical marketing strategies that aim to reach people on multiple channels, from traditional to digital.

Guideway Care is a provider of patient engagement solutions and also offers medical online marketing services to practices and hospitals.

Best Free and Low Cost Ways to Promote Your Medical Practice

Best Free and Low Cost Ways to Promote Your Medical Practice

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect.

Marketing your medical practice is one of the most important things you can do to help grow your patient volumes. By increasing your visibility online, you’re able to be found by those looking for you, be seen by those who are interested, and be known by those who wish to tell their loved ones. No matter which of the types of medicine practices you run, your practice will benefit from medical marketing.

Unfortunately, simply buying ads and hoping for the best can be a very expensive strategy. In this article, you’ll learn about the best low-cost ways to grow your practice using these medical marketing strategies.

6 Low Cost Ways To Promote Your Medical Practice

Google My Business

Google My Business is a free service provided by Google that allows you to put your business’s info on the search engine, even if you don’t yet have a website. This allows you to be found on Google Maps and is one of the ways Google identifies which businesses are where.

To set up Google My Business, simply go to this link and follow the instructions. You’ll need to verify your business’s information. We recommend checking out this guide to Google My Business optimization.

Interact On Social Media

Everyone knows that having a social media presence is important, but it’s not just about making content and posting it. You also want to be interacting regularly with your community.

Not only should you be growing your following with content, using your social media profiles to comment on and share content created by people in the community is a great way to make your brand known.

Email Marketing

Even in this age of Whatsapp and instant messaging, email is still a powerful primary mode of communication for people. By using emails to let people know about events, initiatives, and appointment reminders, you can make sure that your patients always keep you at top of mind.

Be careful with your marketing communications, though. You’ll still have to remain HIPAA compliant and there’s certain data that you simply cannot use for marketing purposes.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of making your website easy to find on search engines. Investing in a SEO company can seem expensive, although it doesn’t need to be. You could also have an in-house marketing specialist do your SEO, however if they’re not already well-versed in SEO it will take longer to get results.

Local Events and Organizations

By being a part of your local chamber of commerce or board of trade, and by actively participating in those events, you can get your practice’s brand out there and be an effective face for the brand while you do.

You can also sponsor some events. Although this can be expensive, sponsoring smaller events can be a low-cost way to effectively market your practice.

Offer Excellent Service & Ask For Reviews

Your online reputation is a key part of your digital marketing efforts. By offering an excellent patient experience, people will be more likely to give you a glowing review online.

However, most people will not review a place without a reason, and usually, that reason is a negative one. So it’s up to you and your staff to be upfront with asking for reviews. Do so in your email communications and make it part of your normal processes.

Guideway Care provides patient engagement solutions, including healthcare digital marketing, EMR integration, and more.

Creative Marketing Ideas for Healthcare Organizations

Creative Marketing Ideas for Healthcare Organizations in 2021

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect.

Medical marketing strategies vary widely, from using SEO and content marketing to traditional TV and newspaper advertising. Despite this, the game is always the same. The goal of successful medical marketing is to help others see your practice or hospital’s brand in a good light, while also reaching those who may be in need of your services so that they will choose you over the competition.

So what kind of creative marketing ideas can you use for your healthcare practice in 2021? Here are a few that you can try.

Creative Medical Marketing Ideas

Host a virtual community event.

The COVID pandemic is still upon us and many places continue to be locked down. Community events have slowed down considerably, but the community is still there. Why not host a virtual community event to spread the word about your hospital or practice?

Virtual community events can be focused on health education, such as an information session about how to exercise and eat healthy during the pandemic, or about risk factors associated with COVID-19. This way, you can continue to play a role in your community even when community events aren’t going on.

Start and grow a TikTok account.

TikTok has grown dramatically in recent years and people of all ages are on it. By starting and growing a TikTok account, you can get in front of all types of people and get the word out about your practice.

One benefit of having a TikTok account is that you can create content either for people in your local area, or for people around the world. Whatever you want to focus on, you can.

One tip for TikTok: take advantage of trending hashtags. This isn’t too different from other social media, but trends aren’t just about hashtags: they’re about the content itself. By including trending songs or topics, you can take advantage of traffic that’s already there.

Showcase your latest technology on YouTube.

People love novelty, and showing off the kinds of technology that your practice uses can be a great way to generate interest on YouTube (and even TikTok and other platforms).

Show off your new robotic surgery capability. Make videos showing how your robotic vacuums and mops clean the halls of the hospital. Take a video of your latest medical devices. The novelty will be both an attraction and a marketing strategy: your practice is on the cutting edge of medical technology and your videos can show it.

Guideway Care is a provider of patient engagement solutions for practices of all sizes. They provide medical online marketing services and strategy for healthcare businesses.

Hospital Marketing Strategies & Ideas That Work In 2021

Hospital Marketing Strategies For 2021

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect.

Hospital marketing strategies have changed a great deal since the start of the digital age. In the past, the focus was on traditional media and strong referral partnerships. Although referral partnerships are still extremely important, digital media has overtaken traditional media as the most important marketing consideration for businesses.

We now live in a world marred by the COVID-19 pandemic and our reliance on our digital presence has become much greater. So what kind of hospital marketing strategies and ideas work well in 2021? Let’s dive into what medical marketing strategies still work.

Digital Marketing Strategy & Ideas For Hospitals That Work in 2021

Healthcare SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engine optimization is nowhere near dead yet, despite what some “experts” will have you believe. After all, we all use search engines to help us find what we’re looking for. What these “experts” mean is that SEO has become much more competitive in recent years.

You can break the mold by creating high-quality content, making sure your website is well optimized, and by making connections with other websites that will include links back to your website.

Read more : How to Do Healthcare and Medical SEO? 

Content Marketing With An Emphasis On Video

Content is king on the Internet, and it’s very likely that due to the pandemic, people are consuming online content more than ever. Use this to your advantage! Put out articles regularly and make sure they’re shared on social media.

Video content, however, is where your practice can stand out from the rest. By creating informative and enjoyable content for the Internet, you can position yourself as an authority while also helping your online presence grow.

Read more : Crafting the Ultimate Guide To Creating Healthcare Video Content: Four Key Considerations 

Online Reputation Management

Your online reputation is such an important part of your online presence because it’s been shown that customers trust reviews. The general assumption is that online reviews are more trustworthy than marketing material, and because of this, prospective patients will use reviews to decide whether or not they want to work with you.

To manage your online reputation, you’ll need to see what people are saying about you. What you’ll also need to do is ask your patients for reviews as a normal part of your processes. By doing this, you can get honest feedback from your patients that can then be used to help other prospects decide whether or not they should trust your practice.

Data-Driven Decision Making

There are a lot of different strategies and tactics you can use to help grow your practice. However, not all of them will work equally well. It’s important to make sure that you’re collecting the necessary data in order to make better marketing decisions.

Collecting data on web traffic, traffic sources, search rankings, appointment scheduling rates, and appointment show rates will help you understand where your customers are coming from and what behaviors and actions they’re taking on your website. Use this data to decide where your marketing dollars will go for next year.

Guideway Care provides patient engagement solutions, as well as healthcare marketing solutions such as healthcare advertising and healthcare SEO.

How To Come Up With A Bariatric Marketing Strategy

How To Come Up With A Bariatric Marketing Strategy & Grow Your Practice

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Convert.

If you run a bariatric surgery clinic, you may be wondering how you can grow your marketing efforts to reach more potential surgery prospects. Although bariatric surgery is becoming more popular as more people learn about its benefits, getting yourself in front of those people requires an understanding of how to market your practice online.

In this article, you will learn about different ways you can grow your bariatric clinic using these tips for bariatric marketing strategy.

Tips for Bariatric Marketing Strategy

Be where your prospects are.

Many people are searching for information about bariatric surgery on Google and other search engines. If you can’t easily be found on Google or Bing, then you are missing out on a lot of potential patients! Not only that, but your prospects also spend a lot of time on social media, often looking at potential weight loss methods.

Using SEO for bariatric clinics can help your practice become more visible on the search engines. PPC for bariatric clinics is a great way to show your offer directly to those who are ready to schedule a consultation. Social media marketing can help you grow your brand. By being where your prospects are, you are more likely to be seen by the people who would benefit from bariatric surgery.

Educate your prospects.

Bariatric surgery is the most effective way for obese patients to lose weight and keep it off. Despite this, only about 1% of eligible prospects actually go through with surgery. There are plenty of reasons for this, but it’s often due to what they don’t know.

For example, many people aren’t aware that bariatric surgery is covered by most insurance plans. You can educate them on how insurance can help pay for their surgery. Learn more about insurance verification services companies!

So how do you educate your prospects? You need the content. Creating articles and videos on important bariatric surgery topics is a great way for you to grow your content base, position your practice as an authority in the space, and educate prospects to get them more comfortable with the commitment of bariatric surgery.

Ask for reviews from patients.

Most bariatric surgery clinics live and die by their before and after photos. While these are powerful tools to convince people to schedule a consultation, they’re not going to be sufficient because nearly every bariatric clinic has these! In addition to getting before and afters, you want to ask your patients to leave reviews on sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook.

These reviews are highly trusted and bariatric surgery is a big commitment. People don’t just wanna see how much weight they can lose, they want to know how compassionate the surgeons are and how much support they get during their journey. By asking for reviews from your patients, you can show the world what sets your practice apart from the others.

Guideway Care offers patient engagement solutions and medical online marketing services for medical practices, hospitals, and healthcare businesses of all types.

How To Get More Patients To Your Practice Without Burning Money

How To Get More Patients To Your Practice Without Burning Money

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Convert.

Getting patients to come to your practice is a key aspect of running one. After all, medical practices are still businesses and in order to stay afloat, they need to maintain sufficient patient volumes. As a result, medical marketing strategies are super important for any practice, regardless of specialty or general practice of medicine.

Of course, healthcare advertising can be expensive and not all practices have room in their budget to grow their ad spend. In this article, you will learn about how you can get more patients to your practice without breaking the bank.

Tips For Attracting More Patients On a Budget

Understand Your Patient Base

There are several things you need to understand about your patients before you’re able to effectively grow. The first is to understand the areas in which you’re lacking. Patient satisfaction surveys can help you uncover your practice’s weak points.

Another thing you need to understand is the demography of your patient base. Answer the following questions:

  • How old are they on average?
  • what races and ethnicities are present
  • what languages are spoken
  • how far does a patient have to travel to reach your office
  • How educated are they?
  • What’s the average and median income?

Build Relationships With Referring Practices

Most practices get patients through referrals, and these referrals come from building good relationships with primary care providers and other non-specialists.

Some tips on building good relationships with referring practices:

  • Make sure referred patients have a wonderful experience. Patients see their primary care provider relatively often and have a relationship with them, and their word will be taken seriously by the physician.
  • Create a direct line of contact between your practice and practices that refer patients to you. This makes it easier to share information.
  • Let the referring practice know of treatment and other notes promptly after the treatment has been provided.

Make Your Online Presence Strong

A strong online presence is absolutely paramount in the digital age. It’s not as simple as just having a website and some social media accounts. A strong online presence means that patients are able to find you, online communities know about you, and your website is easy to use by anyone no matter what device they use.

Investing in healthcare SEO is one of the best ways to build a strong web presence. Doing so usually involves working with a healthcare SEO company, but it also means creating content for people to read or watch online.

You also want to make sure that your practice is actively participating on social media. By having a staff member regularly interact on social media on behalf of the practice, your practice will be seen by more people in the community.

Grow Your Reach In The Community

In addition to a strong social media presence, you also want to make a concerted effort to be a part of the community that you serve. Many physicians are not native to the community they work in and have not had the opportunity to become well known there.

One important part of growing your reach in the community is to be a part of community-held events. A good way to do this is to sponsor and attend events held by groups such as the chamber of commerce or community service groups.

All in all, growing your practice does not have to be expensive or complicated. By being there for your patients and providing an excellent experience while also making it easy for them to find you, you can see sustained patient growth over time.

How To Use Healthcare Call Centers For A Better Patient Experience

How To Use Healthcare Call Centers To Provide A Better Patient Experience

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect.

Healthcare call centers have been used for decades by practices in order to save on staffing costs and improve efficiency. Unfortunately, hospital call centers haven’t always been the best at handling patient needs. A healthcare management consulting firm found that when 20 hospital call centers were called, 90% of them were completely unhelpful.

These call centers serve an important purpose, as they help triage calls to the right department or provider and can also help with insurance verification, billing, and collections. But should hospital call center investment be cut, or is there a better way to use them? Let’s find out.

Improving Patient Experience with Call Centers

Train your call centers to be compassionate with callers.

Some healthcare call centers may insist that their staff needs minimal training, however in order to get the results you want, you’ll need to use your understanding of your patients to help them serve your patients right.

When patients call about a medical matter, they’re in a vulnerable position and need to be treated with basic human dignity and compassion. Call centers aren’t exactly known for this, and although the reasons for this are complex, staff can be trained to provide a compassionate experience for patients who call your phone.

In your call center training, whether you use a manual or not, you need to make sure that callers are treated with respect and compassion. Otherwise, you risk ruining the chance of getting a patient before they’ve even set foot in your hospital or practice.

Simplify and unify your processes.

This seems more like a technical or business consideration, but overly complex processes can bleed into the patient experience and cause serious problems down the line. If you’re using multiple call centers to handle the load, then you want to make sure that all software suites used are compatible with each other and that a patient’s data can be accessed the same way no matter which call center they were directed to.

Several healthcare companies have formed as a result of mergers and acquisitions, and this can cause unneeded complexity that would otherwise not exist. Making sure that all processes are streamlined throughout the organization will make the patient’s experience much smoother as it can cut down on wait times and reduce the risk of errors.

Invest in multi-channel communications.

Although the call center is still the backbone of patient-hospital communications, it doesn’t mean that patients are always able to call. A Harris Poll found that 64% of consumers would choose texting instead of voice for customer service.

By investing in multi-channel communications, you’re able to connect with patients in the way that they prefer. You also give them the ability to connect with you any time they want. Use a call center that is willing and able to connect with patients through multiple channels.

Guideway Care provides multi-channel patient engagement solutions such as transitional care management turnkey services, medical patient portals, and healthcare call center services in order to improve both patient experience and your bottom line.

Stethoscope, Laptop And Paper

How To Verify Medical Insurance Coverage: Medical Insurance Verification Guide

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect.

The medical insurance verification process is one that is well-known to be annoying at best and disastrous at worst. A simple clerical error or missed question can lead to a patient’s coverage being denied. It’s paramount that you get the right information from the patient in order to prevent denials and to maximize reimbursements.

In this article, you’ll learn how to verify medical insurance in a few easy steps while minimizing the risk of missing crucial information.

Steps on How To Do Insurance Verification

Make sure your patient’s information is up to date.

Without up-to-date information, insurance may deny coverage. The best way to make sure information is up to date is to verify a patient’s information with the patient before they come in.

The important information you need is:

  • Full name
  • Date of birth
  • The name of the primary insured
  • Name of the insurance provider
  • Insurance provider’s contact information
  • Insurance ID
  • Group number

There are a lot of reasons why this information may change. A patient may switch employers, get married or divorced, have a child, or switch insurance for any other reason. Also, make sure to request an up-to-date photo ID and the original insurance card. Make a scanned copy or a printed copy and keep it on file.

Contact the insurance company.

It’s recommended to contact the insurance company at least 72 hours before the patient comes to your office. This will reduce the risk of being denied and will allow you to have the information you need.

You should have gotten the payer’s contact info from the patient. If you were unable to do so, you can find this information online on the payer’s website.

Get the necessary benefits information from the insurance company.

Verifying insurance can be like a game of telephone. For this reason, you’re going to want to clarify benefits information with the insurance company directly. You’ll want to get the following information:

  • Confirm the basic information. Patient’s name, policy and group number, the name of the primary, and the relationship of the primary to the patient
  • Whether the patient is covered on the date of service
  • Whether your practice is in or out of network. If you’re out of network, then ask which services are covered.
  • Copay and/or coinsurance information
  • Patient’s deductible
  • Coverage limitations

There could be more information that is necessary to process the claim. Be sure to keep good records of everything in order to help the process go smoothly. If a patient has secondary insurance, then you’ll have to go through these steps with that insurance as well and you’ll also have to confirm how much will be covered by the secondary provider.

Get verification of co-pay and answer questions that the patient may have.

You’ll need to collect a patient’s due co-pay and make sure that they get a receipt. A patient will need this information to verify their own health insurance. Also, answer any questions that the patient has about their insurance, as it pertains to your services. This will make sure that the patient understands what they will need to pay and what insurance will cover.

Read more: What Is Insurance Verification and Eligibility?

Guideway Care offers patient engagement solutions for medical practices of all sizes. Guideway Care is also a provider of medical online marketing services to help increase your patient volumes and grow your brand’s presence.