Does Your Practice Use the Golden Rule?

Ahhh… the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” A phrase heard a lot growing up, often while learning to navigate social situations. But have you thought about its relevance to how you serve your customers – or in the case of healthcare, your patients and their experience with your office?

The universal truth is this: Everybody is a patient at one time or another, even doctors are patients sometimes. We’ve all experienced what it’s like to be the one receiving care.  Understanding the patient mindset, expectations and needs, hits close to home. It’s fitting to remember the Golden Rule as you make decisions about your patient experience.

What does it look like to apply the Golden Rule to your patient call center and how is it different from how you are operating today?

Personalizing Care for Each Patient

When you call your doctor’s office, are you greeted by name? Most medical offices answer the phone as though the person calling is a stranger, and they collect the same information every time they call, because the workflow says so.

The technology exists so that the phone system can identify the caller ID and pull up the patient’s record at the time of the call. LYP Health Management is an example of a patient call center using that technology today. Greeting customers by name is a common practice in other industries, but it’s not frequently seen in healthcare. Isn’t it how you would like to be treated when you call your doctor’s office?

Truly Listening and Serving Individual Patient’s Needs

A premium patient experience cannot be a surface level engagement. Yes, the phone scripts and workflows are important, but it is not a cookie-cutter process. Every patient call center associate must be sensitive to each unique situation and have the freedom to act in a way that’s helpful and comforting for the person calling.

For example, if a patient calls following a recent knee surgery with concerns about fever, pain, and tenderness at the incision, there’s urgency in the request. They’re in pain and need a solution right away. This particular scenario requires empathy, and also, taking immediate action.

If the workflow suggests telling the patient to wait for a call back from the provider, the patient call center associate should have the freedom to go off script, to serve the patient the way they themselves would like to be treated in that situation. Isn’t that how you would like to be treated as a patient?

To adhere to the premium level of personalized care each patient wants and deserves involves preparing for the unexpected and an ability to approach each interaction calmly and with out-of-the-box, critical thinking. This requires active listening and identifying an urgent need for care. It’s a level of service that is simply not available through an IVR or an answering system and can be easily lost in the shuffle of unreturned voicemails.

Providing live, trained patient call center associates to answer calls 24/7/365 ensures the level of service you would like, if you were the patient. It’s what it looks like when the Golden Rule is working for your medical practice.

Treat Every Call as the Most Important Call

Patient satisfaction is paramount when it comes to handling calls. With every interaction, making sure a patient’s concern or request is addressed, with understanding and kindness, is the ultimate goal. Partnering with a patient call center is a way to extend the exceptional level of care you’re already providing patients and maintain its quality.

Rather than being bogged down by returning voicemails or having your front desk feel increasingly overwhelmed, alleviate this stress and delegate it to a team of patient care associates who can help. At LYP, we are dedicated to doing what’s best for healthcare organizations and their patients through structured processes, foundational healthcare system expertise, and human-to-human interactions.