Category Archives: General Info & News

Miscellaneous news and happenings in the medical industry of interest to Speedy Claims users.

General Info & News, Guest Posts

Customer Service Essentials Every Medical and Licensed Practitioner Needs

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Customer service is a critical part of providing patient care. In an industry that’s rife with life-and-death situations, delivering superb customer service can greatly heighten the reputation of and trust in a healthcare provider. Moreover, providing quality customer service can also help medical and licensed practitioners avoid the staggering costs of dissatisfied patients. A study from Zhejiang University notes that patient satisfaction is one of the most important factors when measuring the success of a healthcare provider. Failing to respond to the concerns, queries, and questions of a patient can negatively affect patient satisfaction and lead to bad reviews and feedback, which can eventually affect the revenue of the healthcare provider.

However, not every healthcare provider has an on-call staff who can quickly attend to the queries of their patients. In many single provider offices, there’s often only one person managing everything for the doctor. If you’re a licensed practitioner with a small clinic who wants to improve your patient satisfaction rates, we’ve highlighted below some customer service essentials that you should strongly consider.

Responsive customer service

Every healthcare organization should be able to provide great customer service and expertly handle customer concerns. Some key customer service responsibilities in a healthcare organization are scheduling appointments, answering phones, settling patient insurance claims, and answering queries related to medical care and benefits information. For this reason, you should look into improving the customer service skills of your assistant or secretary. Thankfully, plenty of online platforms such as Udemy, HubSpot, and LinkedIn offer customer service certification programs that can help your staff hone their customer service skills.

The right healthcare customer service tool

You should equip your secretary with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool in order to maximize them. With a CRM tool, they can identify sales opportunities, take note of service issues, store patient contact and data, as well as facilitate communication with existing patients. When choosing the right CRM tool, a guide on review website Digital.com notes that you should check for features such as patient management, medical history records, and physician management. Furthermore, you should make sure that the CRM you select is HIPAA compliant to guarantee the security of patient data and avoid lawsuits down the line. Salesforce and Zendesk are some reputable software manufacturers that offer healthcare CRM tools.

A knowledgeable IT professional

As we’ve mentioned, the healthcare industry is a high-stakes sector that experiences a lot of life-and-death situations. With that said, it is critical for your customer service platform and infrastructure to work as smoothly as possible, especially if your practice is involved in emergency services. To ensure that patients experience a seamless service, you should have an IT professional routinely check your systems and infrastructure. This way, you can make sure that the software and tools that you and your assistant use operate smoothly.

Furthermore, providing superb customer service in healthcare also requires a comprehensive and accessible database. To secure your organization’s database, you employ the services database administrator. In an article from Maryville University, it is detailed that database administrators are responsible for organizing huge quantities of data, such as health records and patient information. These professionals often have a background in information technology and computer science, which enables them to build your organization a secure and organized database, and even adapt your legacy databases to newer and more efficient infrastructures.

Customer service chatbots

In a previous post discussing the ‘14 Benefits of Mobile Telehealth Services’, we pointed out that telehealth technology has experienced massive development in the last few years. But aside from specialized diagnostic devices, monitors, and sensors, chatbots are also a telehealth product that is quickly rising in popularity. Powered by artificial intelligence, customer support chatbots can respond to a patient’s inquiries by accessing your organization’s database. Customer service chatbots are a great addition to your healthcare practice as they can relieve your assistant with some of their customer service tasks, provide helpful responses in real-time, enhance business productivity, and boost customer satisfaction.

Every patient deserves the best care possible. To ensure that your practice provides top-notch customer service, do consider what we’ve discussed above.

 

 

Article by Iyanna Viggo

General Info & News

Why HIPAA Compliance Matters for Medical Experts Who Work Remotely

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By Chelsea Lamb of businesspop.net

In this day and age, more and more people are transitioning to working from home, either by necessity or by choice. While in most industries, it’s a shift that can be made with ease and without concerns, the same can’t be said in the field of medicine. This is because medical professionals are not only stewards of health, but also of protected health information (PHI), making the transition to telecommuting something that should be properly controlled and adequately regulated.

HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), by and large, sets the standard for the protection of ultra-sensitive patient data, and lately, the need for HIPAA compliance for work-from-home medical professionals is already being systematically addressed. Here’s what you need to know.

Understand the need for security, above all.

The need for security when working remotely, especially apropos to the handling of PHI, is a well-documented fact. Cases of security breaches are not at all uncommon, putting people’s medical privacy at risk—with costly repercussions at that—and serving as bone-chilling cautionary tales. It goes without saying, therefore, that companies and organizations are not the only ones who need to safeguard PHI. In fact, the same rule applies to medical professionals working remotely too.

Indeed, working from home is widely regarded as a threat to HIPAA compliance. This, in turn, creates the real need to understand the risks and possible issues, as well as solid guidelines and measures firmly implemented, long before a medical professional could and should start working remotely. This invariably takes us to the next point . . .

Make sure you meet the requirements.

HIPAA compliance for remote workers is a many-pronged approach. There is a real need for businesses to enforce base requirements for the equipment, hardware, and software remote workers will use. At the most fundamental level, this will include the strict use of VPN, encryption measures on wireless routers and other devices (including personal ones that may be used for access), the use of firewalls and anti-virus software, and even limiting the use and access of the network to specific brands and versions of devices.

Of course, in such a highly regulated industry, there are bound to be regulations for remote home offices, as well. There is, in fact, a need for a HIPAA-compliant home office as the risk of a security breach increases when medical professionals take work home. So apart from the equipment, software, and network precautions as mentioned above, it’s important to underscore the need to observe safe practices, such as keeping the work computer locked when unattended, ensuring the safe storage and/or shredding of printouts and faxes, and the like.

All these measures are designed to honor and comply with the official HIPAA regulations. It’s only prudent, therefore, to have the latest HIPAA compliance checklist on hand to ensure that your business is covering all the bases.

Establish your compliance and credibility.

Finally, know that it’s one thing to be compliant, but it’s also another for potential clients, vendors and other companies you want to work with to know a business is compliant. It’s more than wise, therefore, to consider increasing the degree of assurance with a HITRUST CSF self-assessment. Best of all, using a platform like myCSF not only helps to maintain regulatory compliance to HIPAA, but also to other standards, including ISO, PCI, and NIST.

Of course, beyond industry compliance, how employees work matters, as well. The fact is, as more and more medical professionals work remotely (and are compliant in doing so), the competition gets fiercer. This makes it necessary to make use of compliant tools and even templates that save time and, by extension, money and efficiency.

Suffice it to say, your organization may have to jump through some very important hoops for your medical professionals to work from home, but there’s really no question of the necessity. Ultimately, HIPAA compliance will not only save your company from the risks of working without it—it could even save lives, too.

5 HIPAA Rules Regarding Text Messaging provided by Provider Tech