At Professional we are dedicated to changing the face of collections by approaching patient accounts with compassion and employing innovative technologies. We operate under the premise that people really want to resolve their financial obligations; they might just need a little help. We have adopted this mentality as a part of all of our processes, switching the focus from the patients’ balances to the patients themselves because a better experience means better engagement. In this post, we are going to identify some of the ways we have used automation technology for the benefit of patients.
The first way we use automation to improve the patient experience is by supporting our agents. When our agents’ jobs are easier, they have better morale and more time to focus on patient relations. We use robotic process automation to free our agents of back-end processes and repetitive tasks. Other use cases for robotic process automation in the industry include front-end scheduling, check-in, and bill pay. Alleviating the burden of mundane tasks, by automatically indexing documents, updating accounts, issuing reports, lets agents focus on the human side of their job. We also provide our agents with the most cutting-edge tools available. Our A/R system is modern and user-friendly, facilitating speedy account navigation and taking the guesswork out of processes by providing automated workflows. Not only do patients get an agent’s undivided attention, but they are also provided with a consistent and efficient experience no matter who takes their call.
The next way we use automation technology to create a positive patient experience is by offering a variety of automated self-service tools. Self-service tools give patients a degree of autonomy, and allow them to perform many activities on their own accounts at their own convenience. We provide patients with an online account portal and a mobile app that eliminates any wait or time constraints on account access. Patients can check their balances, make payments, set up payment plans and change their profile details all within the portal. When setting up a payment plan online or through the mobile app, patients are provided a default recommendation for the amount of the recurring payment based on how others have successfully paid off similar balances. If patients want to tailor a plan more closely to their needs, they can move the sliders for down payment and recurring payment in either direction and see immediately how these new amounts would impact total interest to be paid and how long it will take to pay off the balance. Exploring all their options with someone over the phone might take patients much longer and would be limited by the availability of live agents during business hours. However, if a patient prefers to make a payment over the phone after business hours, they can use Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) for assistance.
Finally, our speech analytics technology automates monitoring, auditing, and trend analysis enabling foolproof compliance management and faster process improvement cycles. With speech analytics, we can automate our reporting for agent performance as well as monitor various aspects of the patient experience such as the language and acoustics associated with emotional disposition. These insights are used to identify root causes for financial challenges and additional opportunities to improve the patient experience.