How leading organizations provide a first-class patient experience

Leading healthcare organizations are working hard to integrate services, back-offices, and operations to adapt to changing patient needs and business conditions.

To achieve this goal, these organizations are deploying best-in-class customer operations plans designed to reduce costs, increase revenue, increase productivity, and improve patient satisfaction.

During the webinar in September Becker Hospital Reviews Sponsored by ServiceNow, ServiceNow Healthcare CTO Drew Koerner and Aberdeen Vice President and Chief Analyst Omer Minkara discussed steps to improve customer operations.

Five points:

1. Medical institutions are increasingly treating patients as customers. A by-product of the consumerization of healthcare is treating patients as customers. Mr. Minkara explained that customer operations are “a healthcare organization that synchronizes activities in the service part (customer service) and back office of the business, including scheduling appointments, managing medical records, and ensuring insurance coverage.”

2. Healthcare organizations often have islands of different goals. In healthcare organizations, there are silos and lack of common goals between service and back-end stakeholders. Isolated islands lead to poor communication and inefficiency, and different stakeholders believe that they have different “customers.” One result is that back-office roles often incur the costs of supporting patients moving forward because “the back-office does provide them with critical support,” said Mr. Mincara. “A lot of the costs associated with the service are borne by the back office,” he continued, which makes the leadership aware of the need for greater common goals.

3. Many challenges faced by organizations can be solved by improving customer operations. Improving customer operations requires common goals and objectives—such as improving the patient experience—and better collaboration, improved communication, and optimized workflows that tie everything together.

“Optimization of patient services may happen to those back-office personnel [through workflows],” Mr. Koerner said. Workflow connects departments and enables cross-departmental collaboration. Through workflow, organizations can “automate some of these processes” to close the gap and provide better and faster services.

4. Healthcare organizations with first-class customer operations can achieve higher patient satisfaction and operating profit margins. First-class organizations have higher patient retention rates and higher patient satisfaction. They experience higher productivity and higher first contact resolution rate for customer issues. These top-performing organizations are also preventing cost increases. The combination of operational efficiency, increased patient trust, cost reduction and revenue growth has improved profitability.

These organizations are also doing a better job of meeting consumer expectations influenced by e-commerce companies. “them [best-in-class performers] Minimize patient effort and meet patient needs, while providing more cost-effective and profitable care,” said Mr. Minkara.

5. In providing the best patient experience, some customer actions are important. The speaker identified the following pillars as the basis for providing the best patient experience and reducing costs.

• • Regular review Identify problems and inefficiencies in the process.
  • quality assurance Understand the extent to which the organization meets regulatory standards.
  • Flexible and simplified workflow Manage and execute as business conditions change.
  • Real-time activity management Dynamically address patient expectations and local conditions. Using workflow automation can help with real-time management.
  • Digital transformation It uses digital services to collect and use data to improve the experience and automate some customer operations.

To register for the upcoming webinar, please click here.