Author: Jeff Tormey

Qualities of a Successful Medical Information Call Center Agent

Written by Jeff Tormey on February 3, 2021. Posted in Manage.

When a patient calls a hospital, they’re usually directed to a call center whose job is to triage them to the right department and get them the information they need so that they’re satisfied enough to end the conversation. Call centers are used for appointment scheduling, providing information about the hospital, insurance matters, and more.

Now, think about it from a patient’s point of view. They’re in a vulnerable place and they’re doing something that they’d rather not do, whether that’s scheduling an appointment or trying to figure out when they can see their sick relative. You want someone with the right qualities to answer the phone and provide the support that the patient needs.

So what qualities does a successful medical call center agent have?

Qualities That A Medical Call Center Agent Should Have

The ability to communicate with compassion.

When someone calls a hospital call center, they’re not exactly in the best frame of mind. They might be short with an agent, or they might express sadness and frustration with their situation. Someone who wants to see their sick relative is not looking to waste a lot of time on the phone and might be feeling overwhelmed.

A successful medical call center agent is compassionate and shows it through their tone of voice and their choice of words. An agent should show that they understand what the person on the other line is going through and that they’re not alone, and that the agent is there to help.

A willingness and ability to handle pressure.

Medical call center jobs are not easy, and some situations can literally be life or death. Having the ability to work under pressure is key for a call center agent because of the stakes. This might be something you want to filter out during the hiring process, but training for high-pressure situations is also recommended.

A thorough understanding of your hospital’s or practice’s offerings.

Nobody wants to be directed to someone on the phone that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. By training a call center agent on what your hospital or practice does, they will be able to sound more knowledgeable over the phone and they’ll be in a better position to represent your brand in the most positive light.

Attention to detail

As stated earlier, these jobs are pretty high stakes and one crucial missed detail could be a problem for things like insurance and relaying important information about an appointment. A good call center agent should have a high level of attention to detail and they must be able to juggle multiple things while keeping those details straight.

Ability to retain and recall important information

This can’t be understated, because call center agents are bombarded with information that they might not be able to record right then and there. Remembering key information for when someone gets on the line next time will be the difference between providing poor service and excellent service. Encourage agents to utilize their resources and keep good notes so that they can use their recall abilities on the most important info.

Guideway Care is a top provider of patient engagement solutions for healthcare businesses of all sizes.

Employee from marketing department checking company statistics

How to Fine Tune Your Marketing for Healthcare Businesses in 2021

Written by Jeff Tormey on February 1, 2021. Posted in Convert.

Marketing for healthcare businesses is not quite the same as marketing for other businesses. There are different considerations, such as HIPAA compliance, and marketing healthcare services requires slightly different tactics than marketing a store or a professional service. But marketing is still important for medical practices and other healthcare businesses, and there are things you’ll need to do in order to fine-tune your medical marketing strategies.

4 Steps to Optimizing Your Medical Marketing Strategies

Use past data to figure out what works.

If your business is brand new, you won’t have access to historical internal data. But, if your business has been operating, you can use what you’ve done to help figure out where your marketing dollars should go in the future.

Answer the following questions:

What marketing strategies did we invest in last year?
Did we see growth in the following KPIs:
- Patient volumes
- Patient values
- Overall revenue
- Overall profit
What strategies worked the best, based on the data we have?

If you don’t have data, or your business is brand new, your priority should be to make sure that you are able to collect that data this year. Companies like Guideway Care can help you collect and analyze patient engagement data in a HIPAA-compliant way.

Brainstorm new ideas.

At this stage, what you want to do is figure out what new marketing strategies could be used to generate new patient leads. Healthcare advertising, medical SEO, social media marketing, traditional marketing strategies such as radio or news… there’s a lot that can be done! But not all of these ideas will be equally viable.

Take insights from people in your company who work patient-facing roles and who are intimately familiar with the initial stages of patient onboarding. You’ll also want to use the insights from people who work with the website, the social media, and anything else related to your practice’s online presence.

Assess the ideas and come up with a strategy for each viable one.

Not all ideas will be right for this year. You will have likely settled on a few strategies that are viable for your practice. Not only that, but you’ll also have the original strategies that you’ve been using that have worked thus far.

Now, it’s time to come up with a strategy and an action plan for these initiatives. You’ll want to come up with the following:

Tasks required
Team members & their responsibilities
Timeframe
Costs involved
Ideal outcomes

Set SMART goals for these strategies.

SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The goals you choose should be based on KPIs that directly contribute to the bottom line.

Of course, not all strategies will work in the end. You will want to assess the results at the end of your chosen timeframe and decide whether or not it’s worth pursuing in the future.

Medical Content Marketing: How Content Marketing in Healthcare Works

Written by Jeff Tormey on January 31, 2021. Posted in Connect.

Blogging and video creation are two of the most popular ways that healthcare practices make content. This content isn’t for nothing, though: these practices are engaging in content marketing, and as a strategy, content marketing in healthcare has been shown to work. In fact, content marketing companies do a lot of marketing to doctors offices because it’s such a powerful strategy.

So how can you take advantage of the power of content marketing? How does content marketing fit into a medical online marketing strategy?

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategy that relies on creating and distributing highly valuable content on a consistent basis in order to build a loyal audience of people who are relevant to the business. It can be done through blog posts, video, infographics, and more.

The idea behind content marketing is that you give away value for free in order to do several things. First, you’re getting your name out there by connecting your practice’s brand to valuable content. Second, you’re becoming a trusted authority, allowing your readers to see you as someone who should be trusted with their healthcare. Third, you’re helping to engage the patients you already have by producing content that they could benefit from.

How Do You Get Traffic to Your Content?

Content marketing is only as good as its reach, and there are many ways that marketers aim to build up their website traffic. The first and most common way is through search engine optimization, or medical SEO. You can check out another article on Benefits of Medical SEO.

Another common way is to post content on social media and content sharing platforms. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are great ways to build up traffic to your content. You can also use content sharing platforms such as Reddit, or Youtube for healthcare video content.

Some healthcare advertising companies use content marketing as a way to get a lot of eyeballs to your website, however this requires paying for advertising that could be better utilized by advertising your services directly to people who have shown interest, such as through search advertising.

Should I Invest In Content Marketing?

The answer is yes, however there are some things you should consider. First, content marketing requires content creation. Blog posts require time and energy, or the funds to pay a blog writer. Videos are even more expensive and time-consuming to produce. You’ll want to understand the cost of creating content before you commit to a content marketing strategy.

There are content marketing companies that can help you produce content, but before you choose one, you’ll need to understand what kind of content they’ll produce for you. Not only that, you’ll want to see the quality of this content to gauge whether you’re willing to put your brand name on that content.

Guideway Care provides patient engagement solutions, including content creation and medical content marketing services. Learn more about what Guideway Care can do for your practice!

Team Celebrating Success With Large Thumbs-Up Icons

How To Generate a Google Reviews Link For Your Medical Practice

Written by Jeff Tormey on January 29, 2021. Posted in Convert.

Online reviews have become extremely important for all types of businesses. It’s been shown that people trust online reviews more than they trust the copy on your website. They want to read about a real experience that someone actually had and is willing to share. Not only that, but people’s attention is driven more toward reading negative reviews than positive ones.

What this means is that it’s paramount to make sure that people who have a good experience with you also talk about said experience. One easy way to do that is to create a Google Reviews link for your medical practice.

How To Create a Google Reviews Link for Local Doctor Reviews

This process is a very simple one and only takes a few minutes. It requires you to have your business already on Google My Business. If you don’t have a Google My Business account, simply register for one and follow the directions: How to Set Up A Google My Business Account

Once you’ve confirmed that your business is visible on Google, just follow these steps:

Go to Google Places API
Type in your business’s name and location
Get the Place ID for your medical practice

Now that you have your Place ID, all you have to do is append the ID to the following link: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=your place_id

You can put this link in automated emails, text messages, or on your website to make it easier for people to write a review.

The Importance of Google Doctor Reviews

People who are searching for medical services online are looking to see how good of an experience patients have had. Patients will often provide their own experiences by dropping a Google review. However, people who do review on their own are rare and often need to be reminded to do so.

People are likely to give a review if they’ve either (1) had an amazing experience and would absolutely go again, or (2) had a bad experience and want to warn others to stay far away from that doctor. Both are ways that patients help other prospective patients make decisions about who to see for their medical issues. It stands to reason, then, that a practice that has an abundance of good reviews and a dearth of bad ones would be more likely to get new business.

Of course, not all reviews are relevant. Some people may write reviews based on things that aren’t in your control, such as insurance billing issues or isolated incidents. For this reason, you may want to invest in reputation management services. These companies will not only dispute and respond to negative reviews, but they will also help you get real positive reviews from your clients by giving you the tools needed to request these reviews.

One bad review can outshine several good ones, but it’s important for a practice (or any business) to maintain a high ratio of good reviews to bad ones. This shows prospective patients that bad experiences are few and far between.

Guideway Care provides healthcare engagement solutions. They include healthcare marketing services, healthcare call centers to take a load off of your staff, and access to a powerful healthcare CRM that syncs with your program’s EMR and website. Learn about Guideway Care vast array of patient engagement solutions!

How to Fine Tune Your Marketing for Healthcare Businesses in 2021

Written by Jeff Tormey on January 25, 2021. Posted in Convert.