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The Importance Of A CRM That Is HIPAA Compliant

The Importance Of A CRM That Is HIPAA Compliant

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies, Manage.

The healthcare industry is constantly going through changes. Technology is a fantastic tool that helps you streamline your health services for patients. However, it also comes with its downsides. One of the benefits of having a CRM in the healthcare industry is ensuring that it complies with HIPAA regulations. That way, you can have peace of mind while conducting your medical services and handling patient information. Let’s talk about some of the benefits of having HIPAA-compliant CRM software:

HIPAA 101

HIPAA is a federal regulation that sets standards for security when protecting health information. It helps ensure that the handling and transmission of patient records is done efficiently with their best interest in mind. Therefore, choosing the right healthcare CRM platform is essential for meeting these regulations.

The Benefits of HIPAA Compliance for CRMs

Cyber Attack Protection

Properly integrating your healthcare CRM with other systems can help prevent attack vectors when it comes to cybercrimes. Since healthcare practices are often targeted in these schemes, it’s important to have a robust infrastructure in place.

Avoiding Fines And Fees

Growing your healthcare practice means you need to limit your expenses and improve revenues. Ultimately, if you violate HIPAA regulations, you could face significant expenses. Fines can range from a few thousand dollars up to several million dollars. In the latter case, it could be absolutely crippling to your healthcare growth. Therefore, one of the major benefits of having a HIPAA-compliant CRM solution is to eliminate this risk.

Avoid Loss of Focus

Every year, you already have HIPAA training with your entire medical staff. However, if you have to bring in agents and train them how to work on secondary priorities, then it’s only going to result in additional headaches and complications. Having a secure CRM automates many parts of your workforce’s daily routines while still protecting financial and personal information — saving a lot of mental energy.

Access Patient Information

Having your patient information on demand helps doctors and other medical staff serve patients at a higher level. Before treating them, you can quickly understand diagnoses, previous conditions, and other important information.

Save Time

An automated healthcare CRM solution that is compliant with HIPAA is a great way to save time in your operations. With certain siloing of information, security protocols, and presenting information on a must-need basis, the right CRM can help you streamline your compliance. Additionally, it allows you to address client needs in real-time.

Improve Trust

Patients come to your practice because they trust you with their health and with their information. If you violate either of those aspects of trust, then your reputation will suffer, and that will mean fewer clients, patients, and revenues. When it comes to HIPAA compliance, CRM selection is one of the most essential steps to encourage trust and security.

Make Your CRM Software HIPAA Compliant

Reach out to Guideway Care today. Our CRM integration solutions help you stay within compliance with HIPAA and other healthcare laws. Protecting electronic medical records and patient information is crucial. So don’t take the risk of having software that doesn’t meet the task required for the demanding healthcare industry of today.
Types of Call Forwarding In A Healthcare Call Center

Types of Call Forwarding In A Healthcare Call Center

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies, Manage.

When it comes to call forwarding, there are a lot of aspects to consider for the healthcare industry. For context, call forwarding happens when a phone call is sent to a different person when the initial recipient cannot answer. For example, you can forward a call to another healthcare call center agent or an automated call forwarding service. This ensures that all of your inbound calls are answered in a timely manner. While you may have heard of call forwarding before, you may not be aware of the different types of call forwarding available. So in this article, let’s talk about medical call forwarding services in depth.

Call Forwarding Types

Unconditional Forwarding

This is also referred to as straight directory forwarding. This automatically forwards calls right away, no matter what the scenario. This is common for virtual phone numbers, where you may have several numbers that all route to one endpoint. If an agent is going to pick up the phone, they’ll typically hear a call whisper. This tells them what number is calling or what client the call is for, so they know how to answer it appropriately.

Call Cascading

This is more complex than a straight redirect. Call cascading lets you redirect incoming phone calls to different phones. You can order the sequence how you want instead of having them all ring simultaneously. Some call centers have a hierarchy that helps increase internal efficiency using call cascading.

Find Me / Follow Me

Find Me services are those that let you receive incoming calls from anywhere. Follow Me services allow you to be redirected to a specific location. The Follow Me services also allow you to reach a specific phone number defined by the user. A virtual phone number is typically assigned and can receive calls on multiple devices.

Hunt Groups

Line hunting is another word for hunt groups. This technique distributes phone calls from a certain phone number to different lines. An algorithm determines which recipient will answer the phone. Typically in a call center, the person whose phone has been inactive the longest will receive the call. It helps decrease call wait times within healthcare call centers.

Circular Hunting

Using a round-robin technique, the call is forwarded to the next available line until no lines are left. Then the next call goes to the first phone number in the sequence. This is why it’s called circular hunting. Of course, this requires that your call center team members are well-trained and prepared for their turn. Read here to learn more about the qualities of great medical call center agents.

Call Whisperer Screening

Call whisperer screening allows the agent to determine which call they answer and in what order. They get clues about the caller’s name, location, or other information.

Get Professional Medical Call Center Services

If you want real results with your medical program, then contact Guideway Care today. Our patient conversion solutions take your specific needs into account, helping you optimize patient outcomes and revenue streams. From call center services to digital marketing, our team of experts is here to enhance your entire healthcare program.
Paid Search Tips Healthcare Organizations Need to Know

Paid Search Tips Healthcare Organizations Need to Know

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies, Manage.

Online search has become a much more competitive field in recent years. This is especially true for the healthcare industry. Doctors, hospitals, and other medical organizations must leverage search to bring new clients in and expand their online footprint. To help you through these strategies, let’s talk about some of the main paid search tips for healthcare programs to keep in mind. Further Reading: Paid Search Mistakes in Healthcare to Avoid

Paid Search Tips For Healthcare Marketers And Organizations

Use Quality Video Production

You can improve your landing page experience by using video. This also helps you explain your procedures, services, and team quality in greater detail.

Explain More On Your Website

You can never have too much information when it comes to your landing page. You should have a strong call to action with some engaging elements. Additionally, you should have all the proper contact information, such as phone numbers, emails, or social media handles available. From there, you should also have a service page that presents your most profitable or most important services that you offer.

Testing

It’s a great idea to hire a healthcare marketing firm to do testing on your website. When someone arrives at your website, they can see one or two versions. Eventually, you’ll find that certain versions of your website increase your appointments, revenues, and overall conversions. You can continue to swap out versions so that only the best are competing against themselves. Ultimately, this is automating your program’s growth.

Optimize For Mobile

Many people use mobile devices these days. If you aren’t optimizing your website for mobile, you’re missing out on many potential businesses. So make sure that your website appears beautifully on tablets, smartphones, and desktop computers alike. You’ll be able to capture as much market share as possible.

Leverage Call Forwarding And Other Call Services

Invest in a support phone number that is automated to route the call to the right customer service agent at your healthcare call center — bridging online and offline strategies. Start with one primary phone number that then routes to different call center locations, agents, or services. Using a great healthcare marketing firm like Guideway Care can help you automate this so that you can focus on providing the best medical services possible.

Understand Your Audience

Any type of paid search or organic search starts with understanding your audience. What are they looking for? For instance, a foot surgeon may deal with people that are having aches in their heels or ankles. This is just one example, but you should always create keywords in your content that talk about the issues or problems that your patients are experiencing at that moment. This will help you capture additional organic and paid traffic.

Improve Your Healthcare Search Strategy

The healthcare digital marketing team at Guideway Care can help you qualify and drive more leads to your healthcare website. From there we’ll help you convert additional patients to improve revenues and grow your healthcare program. It’s time to embrace pay-per-click and SEO to optimize your online search strategy — that way, it’s ready for 2023 and beyond.
How A Missed Call Can Impact Business For Healthcare Organizations

How A Missed Call Can Impact Business For Healthcare Organizations

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies, Manage.

Running any kind of business requires excellent customer contact methods. This is especially true for healthcare, where the stakes are high. However, a lot of healthcare programs don’t understand the effect that missing a phone call can have. So, in this article, we’ll talk about how a missed call can impact business for healthcare operators.

The Impact Of A Missed Call On Your Business

Patient Outcomes

There’s always a reason that a patient or potential customer calls your healthcare center. They’re either looking to learn about your health services or schedule an appointment with their doctor. They could even have an emergency. If the call is missed, they could miss out on an opportunity to improve their long-term health. This is the best-case scenario. In a worst-case scenario, they could even miss a significant opportunity to speak with their doctor about an urgent symptom that they have. That’s why it’s so important to invest in a healthcare call center that can answer inbound calls quickly and professionally. Quickly answering incoming calls is important. But read this blog post to learn other essential aspects of customer service in medical call centers.

Reputation

Your healthcare program must maintain a positive reputation in the marketplace to maintain success. No one wants to visit a hospital with a poor reputation due to long wait times to get help. They may assume that they won’t be treated properly in a medical sense as well. Therefore, the faster you can answer calls, the better your reputation and patient acquisition will be.

Costs

Every time that someone has to call back, it can increase the cost required to get that patient back on the phone. Call center agents usually receive calls automatically or have a system internally to handle each incoming call. So once they’re taken off of their daily workflow to chase down a missed call, expenses rise considerably.

Time

There’s only a limited amount of time for every healthcare organization and every human being. This goes for your call center operations as well. When you miss calls, time is taken away from crucial healthcare operations when it isn’t necessary.

Growth

In order to grow your healthcare practice, you need to be able to quickly communicate with and treat patients. Anything that slows this process down will negatively affect your growth. Therefore, having fast call times can improve your ability to build on what you’ve already achieved.

Decrease The Impact Of Missed Calls On Your Healthcare Business

Hire the best healthcare call center available: Guideway Care. Our expert call center agents can help filter inbound calls, make outbound calls, handle insurance verification, and more. That way, patients never are left on hold for too long or have their calls go to voicemail. Ultimately, this can help you improve your reputation, revenues, and patient outcomes.
Call Transfers Vs. Call Forwarding: Key Differences

Call Transfers vs. Call Forwarding: Key Differences

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies, Manage.

Healthcare call centers have to handle a large number of calls every day. Automation features allow these centers to handle patient calls and maximize the use of their live agents. Two techniques are used in medical call centers — forwarding and transferring. However, you might be wondering what the distinction is between these two methods. So let’s look at the differences between call forwarding vs call transfers right now. That way, you can better strategize how to incorporate medical phone services into your organization.

Understanding Call Transfer vs. Call Forwarding

What is Call Forwarding?

Call forwarding is when a patient calls a healthcare call center but is forwarded to another line without them knowing. This is based on predefined triggers. It allows call centers to use multiple numbers to reach different markets while still routing them to the same call center. It can also connect different departments with each other. While only one support number may be published, the proper department can receive the call at the right time. Additionally, if an agent is unavailable, then the call will be rerouted to another available staff member.

What is a Call Transfer?

Call transfer, instead of a call forwarding feature, is not automated. Instead, it’s a feature that allows the call center agent to manually transfer their call to another person. This may be a supervisor who can better help the patient, or another agent who’s more available at that time. A blind call transfer is when the agent transfers it to another person without informing them of the context of a call. An attended call transfer is when the agent places a customer on hold and then speaks with the other team member first. Call transferring can help agents better resolve patient inquiries, scheduling, insurance verification, and more.

The Benefits Of Medical Call Centers

If you run a medical program, then handling inbound customer calls, insurance verification, follow-ups, rescheduling, and more can be a hassle. Instead of dealing with all of this, you can allow your medical staff to focus on what they do best. Outsource forwarding and transferring to a professional agency who understands how to optimize your medical program with medical call center best practices.

Get Healthcare Call Center Services Today

At Guideway Care, we have expert call center agents on staff waiting to help you improve your healthcare program. We can help you engage your patients, improve customer journeys, and ultimately limit the amount of time you need to spend to operate your healthcare facility properly. So reach out today. Discover a new way of streamlining your health services.
Why Use Geofencing in Healthcare?

Why Use Geofencing in Healthcare?

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies, Manage.

When it comes to healthcare call centers, you want to be able to promote your practice in your local area. This is especially true if you have specialty services. Geofencing is a certain tactic that can help you use data at a higher level based on local geographic area. In this article, let’s talk about what geofencing is and how health care practices can use it powerfully. More Reading: Healthcare SEO Best Practices

What Is Geofencing In Healthcare?

Geofencing leverages location data from different mobile devices. This helps health care marketing advertise certain products or services only to people that are in that current geographic area. When you add this to your marketing campaigns, it allows you to achieve better results while wasting less money. Certain forms of digital media like paid social, paid search, can help you target at the zip code or city level. Using programmatic advertising like this, you can send various communications. For instance, you can send an email, a text message, or a push notification to people once they’re in a certain area.

Common Questions About Geofencing

Does geofencing require an app?

No, you don’t need to download a separate application to use geofencing. However, certain marketing platforms will allow it where others won’t. Therefore, leveraging these apps isn’t necessary.

When can you use geofencing?

You can use geofencing for virtually any geographic area. You can do it very precisely, for instance, a few-mile radius, or you can do a larger metro area. You can even geofence around a health conference event, a building such as your medical center, and more. That’s how you use geofencing for your healthcare advertising.

Benefits Of Geofencing In Healthcare

Generating leads

Use geofencing to generate leads that are local to your area. For instance, if you sell certain hospital equipment, you can look for local buyers.

Compare your advertising

Look where your competitors are advertising. You can put your promotions in the same neighborhoods as them to help you gain some of those clients or patients.

Marketing an event

If you’re holding some kind of non-profit or any other type of event, you can use geofencing to target people who are near that location at that time.

Some Additional Benefits Of Geofencing

Geofencing has several benefits:
  • You can engage crowds better during events.
  • You can increase the foot traffic for local people in your market.
  • You can target people in certain areas that are more likely to use or be able to afford your medical services.
  • You can better understand your customers’ behavior. It’s more cost-effective.
Instead of wasting money on a shotgun approach, you can be very narrow with who you target and what you spend your advertising dollars on.

Use Geofencing Today

Contact Guideway Care today. Our expert healthcare digital marketing agents will help you understand how to use this powerful tactic to improve your call center, appointment making, and other communications services with your patients.
Call Center & Patient Feedback: What You Need To Know

Call Center & Patient Feedback: What You Need To Know

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies.

Healthcare call centers should turn over every rock when trying to enhance the customer experience. Treat them like gold and they will treat you well with more business going forward. That being said, there are several strategies you could use. So let’s explore how to improve your customer service and healthcare call center by patient feedback right now:

Why Is It Important To Collect Client Feedback And Call Services?

Feedback is the most important metric for any call center. Helps you run your organization better. It helps you get greater visibility on what your customer base is looking for. Ultimately, you can sharpen your vision and grow your firm from there. For instance, if you received a lot of negative feedback, then you know you’re doing well. If you receive a lot of positive feedback, then you know you have a lot to improve upon. Let’s look at some of the benefits of getting feedback from call centers, as well as strategies.

What is Feedback?

It allows them to tell you about your product or service from their viewpoint. Helps you analyze where you can improve. Feedback can take several forms like customer surveys, interviews, or asking them to share reviews.

Tips To Improve A Medical Call Center With Feedback

Find Out Positives and Negatives

Asking them what they liked, what they didn’t like, and what they might suggest as a change are really important avenues for improving your healthcare call center and medical center.

Customer Participation

The more engaged and active a patient is with your call center, then the more they’re going to feel an affiliation with your brand or medical company.

Recognition

People love to feel like they’re being acknowledged and listened to. Companies that don’t get feedback from customers suffer from them feeling like there’s an impersonal relationship.

Enhancing Your Product And Offerings

It’s difficult to know exactly how to improve your offering without getting direct feedback from the clients. However, when you ask them directly from their mouth what they want, you can simply add that to your offerings.

Get Testimonials, References And Recommendations

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business.This is true for the medical field or anything else. Therefore, by reminding people what they like about your business, they’ll be more likely to refer you to other people.

Improve Your Business

You should always be looking to improve your product and services. Getting customer surveys is one of the best ways that you can do that.

Improve Surveys Today

Reach out to Guideway Care today for medical call center services. Get the best customer survey agents, scripts, and resources. That way, you can continue to grow your practice.
The Basics Of Medical Insurance Verification

The Basics Of Medical Insurance Verification

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Healthcare Companies.

When it comes to running your healthcare organization, medical insurance verification is one of the most important aspects that you can optimize. That being said, there are a lot of questions surrounding what this entails and how best to go about it. For instance, should you outsource to a third party like Guideway Care or should you try to do it yourself? So in this blog post, let’s talk about what medical insurance verification is and why a healthcare call center could potentially be the right strategy for you.

What Is Insurance Verification?

When you check the status of a patient’s insurance coverage, that’s what’s typically considered insurance verification. You also see their eligibility for that service. You can confirm the following:
  • – If a policy expires
  • – If they’re in-network
  • – If a procedure is covered with their benefits
  • – How much of that procedure is covered?
  • – If the patient has an active policy
Insurance verification is incredibly important to perform before you render any services to a patient. After all, you have to understand how they’re going to handle it financially. Otherwise, they may be put in a difficult position to pay out of pocket or go into debt.

How Does The Insurance Verification Process Work?

There are two ways to go about the insurance verification process. You can try to do it in-house. This involves an incredible amount of overhead, time, and hassle. A much easier way to do this is to outsource to a third-party company like Guideway Care. We can provide insurance verification via our healthcare call center. We’ll call the patients on your behalf and verify all the information mentioned above. This makes it zero work for you to allow you to focus on serving patients at the highest level based on your core competencies. In the meantime, we’ll handle all of the verification eligibility requirements.

What Must Be Verified Exactly When Verifying Insurance?

Medical insurance needs to be verified by identifying the person is who they say they are. We also must ensure that their insurance is valid, and then we have to ensure that their claim can be covered. These are all standard parts of the process.

Learn More About Medical Call Centers Today

If you have any questions, from medical insurance verification checklists, to how it works, to how to outsource it, we can help. Reach out to the experts at Guideway Care today. Let’s ensure that you can improve patient outcomes and organizational efficiencies at the same time.
Speech Analytics & Call Centers 101

Speech Analytics & Call Centers 101

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies.

In any healthcare organization, it’s always important to constantly look for ways your medical call center could be improving. That way you can truly meet the needs of your patients in your local market. That being said, a lot of healthcare organizations make the mistake of falling behind by not using data and analytics available to them. So in this blog post, let’s talk about healthcare call center voice analytics. We’ll explain what they mean and why they’re so important. That way you can ensure that you’re on the cutting edge of your healthcare services. And if you’re wondering whether a medical contact center is necessary for your organization in the first place, read this blog next.

The Importance Of Contact Center Speech Analytics

Identifying Correct Therapies, Medications, And Procedures

Obviously, as a healthcare organization, your first priority is to help patients overcome their health ailments and achieve the best health outcomes possible. In order to do that, you need to identify what the best course of action is to help the patient heal, recover, or otherwise rid themselves of negative symptoms. There are two ways that you can approach this. First, you can use your educated guesses as experts. Secondly, you can leverage data and analytics. The reality is that data and analytics provides a lot of analysis that you may not have looked at initially. That’s why it’s so important to use this in your decision-making process. Otherwise, you could risk recommending a therapy or medication that isn’t as effective at that point in time for the patient.

Retention

Using data, you can understand when a patient is likely to churn. In other words, when they are likely to stop visiting your practice. After all, if they go somewhere else or simply stop coming, that does no benefit to them nor to you. So it’s important to recognize the patterns when patients are about to drop off, so to say. Read More: What Is Patient Retention and Why Does It Matter for Your Practice

Enhancing Your Presence

You can use data and analytics to understand which marketing campaigns, content, and promotions are working well online and in print. You can measure appointment rates, show-ups, and more to determine if your messaging is effective.

Get Help With Your Speech Analytics Today At Guideway Care Sequence of Activation

We have a medical call center, but we also specialize in digital media and growing any kind of healthcare program that you may have. Let us handle the administrative and staff complications of your healthcare operations. That way, you can focus on growing the medical services that you provide and treating patients at the highest level of respect and care. Reach out for a free conversation today.
Tips To Engage Inactive Patients

Tips To Engage Inactive Patients

Written by Jeff Tormey on . Posted in Connect, Healthcare Companies.

Patient reactivation is one of the most important topics when it comes to healthcare services. After all, if a patient falls out of engagement and is no longer active, they may miss out on important care. This could cause them to have worsening health conditions and even lead to fatal consequences. That’s why in this blog post, we’re going to talk about how to engage inactive patients to get them back where they need to be. Additional Reading: Empowering Patients To Be Active In Their Experience

The Benefits Of Engaging Inactive Patients

Some of the benefits of engaging in active patients are:

Improving The Health Outcomes

It’s so important for your medical practice to improve the health outcomes of your patients and prevent additional readmissions. Lowering the chance of hospitalization is another side effect of this.

Overall Satisfaction

The better satisfaction that your patients have, then the more that your medical practice can grow. Therefore, by providing excellent experiences and engaging the patients, they’ll feel like they’re more respected. This will lead to better responses and scores on evaluations as well. Read More: The Importance of Patient Satisfaction

Limiting Mistakes

You can’t afford to make mistakes with your patients. Otherwise, you could neglect to provide them with the best levels of care possible and your reputation will suffer. Therefore, the more engaged the patients are, the more you can learn about their specific situations and how to help them with the best approach possible.

Reduce Patient Dormancy

A patient who hasn’t been active or engaged in several years could be considered a dormant patient. This is the next step before they become a lost patient. You need to aim for a retention rate around 50% in order to break even on acquiring the customers. Otherwise, you risk spending additional revenues just to bring in patients to sustain your medical practices.

Engaging Inactive Patients

Engaging inactive patients is no small feat. You need to use a variety of methods available to you. The omnichannel approach is one way to achieve this. Using text messages, SMS, social media, email, and more, you can reach your patients wherever they are. So while there is no one-size-fits-all answer, consulting with professionals in this field can help you put together the right strategy.

Improve Your Patient Engagement Today

Reach out to Guideway Care. We can help you in a variety of ways in your medical practice, from medical insurance verification to appointment scheduling to patient reactivation. Our experts are proud to assist you in any way possible. You deserve a team that understands your industry and how to help your patients at the highest level.