In today’s fast-paced healthcare industry, optimizing the efficiency of front office operations is crucial for delivering exceptional patient care. From managing patient interactions to handling administrative tasks, front office staff play a pivotal role in patients’ satisfaction. Their care experience, when put into practice well, can help improve patient satisfaction for their organization.
Good customer service isn’t just for restaurants, retail, and banks. Consumers of healthcare are more selective than ever when it comes to who is providing their care. With the rapid emergence of healthcare consumerism, spurred in large part due to contactless care precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, patients aren’t stuck with a provider with whom they’re not satisfied.
Creating a Positive Experience to Improve Patient Satisfaction
A patient’s visit with their provider begins and ends at the front desk. This interaction can set the tone for the entire patient journey. It’s often an organization’s first chance to make a good—or bad—impression.
Sounds easy enough, right? Make sure your front office staff is friendly and helpful to patients. Along with a high quality of care from the physician, your practice can improve patient satisfaction.
There is a problem with this scenario. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take into account all the other tasks for which your front office staff is responsible. Along with patient registration and insurance verification, these team members typically have additional responsibilities. They must schedule appointments, answer phones, maintain records and accounts, retrieve patient records, collect payments, handle referrals, and much more.
Friendly and efficient frontend operations can increase practice revenue and also improve satisfaction for both providers and their staff. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of four ways to enhance the productivity of your front office staff.
1. Conduct Regular Staff Training
Your front office staff can’t stick to best practices if they’re not aware of them. That’s why you should regularly train them on the steps, policies, and protocols used to run your practice. Ensure that they don’t have to rely on guesswork. Clearly define each staff member’s responsibilities, and provide them with the tools necessary to fulfill them. Some organizations utilize a daily checklist.
One of the most important aspects of proper staff training is the relevance of software and systems. While this includes electronic health records (EHR), it’s any software or systems that the frontend uses in their duties. By providing comprehensive training, healthcare organizations can help their staff become proficient in using these tools and technologies, which can lead to increased efficiency and accuracy.
2. Offer Patient Self-Scheduling
As we discussed in a recent blog, patient self-scheduling offers myriad advantages for healthcare providers, including labor savings, cost reduction, increased patient satisfaction and engagement, improved care management and adherence, and more. It allows front office staff to focus on other high-value activities, helps the practice fill same-day appointments, and prevents overbooking by providing a clear view of available time slots.
In addition to promoting a positive patient experience by offering convenient 24/7 access to available appointments, patient self-scheduling can reduce the call volume for front office staff. One study found that front office staff spend an average of 8 minutes on the phone with each patient who calls in looking to schedule an appointment. When this is the only method available to patients who are looking to schedule, the phone lines can quickly become overwhelming.
3. Utilize Appointment Reminders
Manually contacting patients to remind them of an upcoming appointment is certainly time-consuming. It also isn’t an easily scalable process and does little to minimize no-shows and cancellations.
Automated appointment reminders enable providers to communicate with patients using their preferred method, whether that’s a text message, email, or phone call. It can prompt patients to reschedule using a digital health tool instead of just missing their appointment, saving time for both the patient and your front office staff. Plus, your team members can use that extra time to engage with patients in-office.
4. Implement Digital Patient Check-In
Automating administrative intake processes with digital patient check-in lowers the burden on your front office staff. How? It puts documentation in your patients’ hands, thereby streamlining workflows, saving hundreds of staff hours, and reducing data entry errors. Patients can use a personal smartphone or tablet to verify their insurance, sign consent forms and authorization releases, verify or update clinical information, and more, all of which update in real-time with the patient’s electronic health record. No more manual data entry from a clipboard into the EHR for staff.
For those patients who may not complete this information before their visit, consider going a step further and providing QR codes in the office waiting room, so that patients can still complete all of their pre-visit forms without causing overcrowding and long wait times at the front desk.
Enabling patients to use digital patient check-in not only decreases wait times, which tends to improve patient satisfaction, it also helps clinicians prepare for a visit sooner, so appointments can be more efficient.
Each of these best practices also aids your front office staff in reducing duplicative processes, mitigating healthcare waste, automating repetitive tasks, and organizing patient data for easier access. They also help to improve the efficiency of your team members without the need for additional staff. Such benefits are especially crucial as the healthcare labor shortage continues.
