September 10, 2024
Create Work Environments that Make Employees Feel Valued
Cultivating patient loyalty is a high priority in healthcare today, but without devoted employees it can be elusive. Loyal employees provide a positive link between your healthcare organization and the patients you serve. They stay in their positions longer—and work harder—because of their allegiance and the pride they feel in a job well done.
Empowering employees with meaningful work also matters. Eliminating tedious, repetitive tasks best handled with automation frees employees to use their smarts and empathy to connect with patients who truly need personal attention. This helps staff members feel personally invested in productive outcomes that delight patients and achieve organizational objectives.
Consider the role of call center representatives, who often have little control at work. They typically work long hours in a noisy and hectic environment. Imagine eliminating patient calls that involve routine tasks, such as processing payments or explaining confusing statements. Not only would this reduce the number of calls representatives handle, it would eliminate stress-inducing interactions with frustrated patients who prefer self-service payment options.
Sophisticated software exists to give patients the self-service control they need, while reducing the tsunami of patient payments handled needlessly by human agents. Technology also has revamped patient billing statements to ensure they are easy to understand (and pay!) at a glance. These smart statements are personalized with custom messaging and layouts that are clear, concise and ready for immediate patient action, such as with QR codes that link to payment portals.
Reducing unnecessary phone calls also helps patient access staff. One leading orthopedic provider in the greater Philadelphia area is using automated phone, email and text messages instead of the 600 weekly appointment reminder calls formerly made by staff. Automated calling also alerts patients when weather events impact hours at its four busy clinics, which used to take close to one day when staff made manual calls.
Alleviating front desk pressure not only has improved the work lives of staff, it has given them time and energy to help patients prepare for surgery and other procedures. This clinic, not coincidentally, employs multiple staff members who have been on the job for close to 20 years. The practice manager says high value is placed on treating staff, and their time, with respect. He believes that correlates with staff loyalty and the reason this healthcare organization already has successfully expanded to four locations.
Other technology is reducing the painstaking work involved in reviewing rejected insurance claims, which often involve simple data coding errors like transposed letters or numbers. While the errors can be straightforward, finding and fixing them is anything but. Many times these rejected claims are simply written off to bad debt because time-crunched staff lack time to address them. Revenue cycle management employees can feel frustrated, or even guilty, in this scenario.
A growing urgent care company in Texas has changed that scenario with the help of digital forms—many of which have uploaded critical details using OCR—which then goes straight into its EHR. Other technology verifies and updates patient addresses and insurance information, so entire teams now can focus on other tasks without worrying about human errors creeping into this fast-paced work environment.
Verifying the correct insurance on file can increase clean claim rates by 22%, with less staff time spent on updating claims and patient information, according to a case study focusing on digitizing the patient intake process reported in HFMA
“There’s still a little manual work to be done,” explains the urgent care company’s chief technology officer, “but it’s so much more efficient to get claims out the door and then get the payments back in with almost zero mistakes.”
The bottom line
Building a dedicated team means ensuring staff work in a supportive environment with modern tools that set them up for success. Connected solutions, like a well-functioning team, keep everyone in the loop and reduce errors, redundancies and rework. They also let employees know you value them and that their contributions matter.
