How to Automate the Patient-Provider Working Relationship

The following is a guest article by Stephen Dean, Healthcare CRM Expert and Co-Founder of Keona Health.

Many health care professionals think the strength of the patient-provider relationship is determined solely by the face-to-face interactions between patients and physicians, and that all problems begin and end there. But in-person interactions are often not the root cause of patient dissatisfaction. Splinters in the relationship can also begin remotely, brought about by frustrating telehealth systems.

Today’s patients want seamless, holistic, and reliable health care access, self-service, and communication. They want to manage their own health affairs online—with a click or a swipe—much like they buy goods on Amazon, order transportation on Uber, or book a hotel room on Expedia. When they do call their provider, they want the service to be quick, smooth, and beneficial.

Enhancing convenience is the key to strengthening the patient-provider relationship. Today, patients’ biggest frustrations—and their lack of trust—are often the result of poor remote interactions. When they struggle to navigate your website, when they experience long hold times, when they must wait weeks for an available appointment, when they aren’t sent text updates, or when they can’t securely send a message to their caregiver.

According to HealthGrades, 80% of patients prefer physicians who offer online scheduling. ECG Management Consultants found that over 30% of patients are willing to switch to a provider who offers digital booking.

Providers are feeling the squeeze. In Medical Economics’ 2022 annual survey, providers said increased competition is now one of their top challenges, namely because today’s patients are increasingly willing, for reasons of convenience, to switch doctors. But offering convenience is difficult for providers who don’t have the staffing resources needed to create this convenience.

Staffing is the #1 problem facing health care organizations—so this is where Artificial Intelligence becomes crucial. AI-software can execute tasks typically performed manually, helping staff members streamline their workflows. AI-software automates and helps guide the telehealth tasks required to build, strengthen, and expand the patient-provider relationship.

AI-software can perform work that providers hadn’t even considered incorporating into their operation, either from lack of resources or from lack of awareness that such work was automatable. Automation allows providers—without any additional staff resources and without sacrificing physician control—to give patients better service by streamlining a host of capabilities:

  • Appointment scheduling
  • Telephone triage
  • Symptom screening 
  • Patient-provider digital messaging
  • Patient engagement

To create effective versions of these services, providers must first automate their staff’s processes. When you simplify your staff’s experience, you simultaneously optimize your patients’ experience.

For example, take patient engagement. Manually engaging patients—sending them appointment reminders, dispensing preventive medicine information, allowing them to reschedule appointments—is a time-consuming process that requires staff resources that many providers don’t have. But if you automate these processes, the system can send out these messages automatically. This not only boosts patient satisfaction, it also lowers no-show rates, eliminates errors, and reduces overhead expenses.

AI and Patient-Staff Interactions

AI can also create efficiency and effectiveness in relations between patients and staff. 

Your phone staff is probably overwhelmed and error-prone because their workflows are complex and inefficient. Employees at some organizations must navigate 100+ page manuals to resolve a call or schedule an appointment. Contact center staff often quit after just a few weeks because of the difficulty of their jobs.

Automation can streamline your staff’s disconnected and serpentine workflows into a simple and straightforward process. The layers of automation required depend on the number of steps, systems, and protocols that your staff, specifically, must navigate to handle patient calls, including:

  • Complex operating procedures
  • Provider requirements: locations, visit rules, procedures, patient preferences
  • HIPAA regulations
  • Clinical safety: screening & escalations

If maneuvering this maze requires many time-consuming tasks, then the key is to consolidate and automate as many of these systems and processes as possible. Automation can enhance both organizational productivity and patient satisfaction, and you won’t need to hire and train new staff.

A fully-automated call support system looks something like this: When a patient calls a staff member, that staff member automatically sees all the essential patient data on a one-page digital interface. The AI-software then guides the staff member through the call until it reaches a successful resolution. 

Organizations that fully-automate their phone system reduce average handle time by 50% and reduce training time by 75%. Patients spend less time waiting on hold, and when they do speak with a staff member, the service is faster and better. 

Integrate AI-Automation with Existing Systems

For AI-software to be effective, it must integrate with your practice management and electronic health record (EHR) systems. When workflow software and EHR platforms are integrated, it creates a powerful telehealth machine, one in which both systems work symbiotically.

Integration means that existing, new, and potential patients receive optimal care, access, and engagement at every step of their journey. The result: a strong and lasting patient-provider relationship that reaps big benefits for health care organizations.

Benefits of Automating the Patient-Provider Relationship

#1: Patient Acquisition, Satisfaction, and Retention

When you automate your phone system, patients spend less time waiting on hold and playing phone tag. Patients who are satisfied with their telehealth experiences are more likely to remain loyal. They are also more likely to leave positive online reviews, which in turn attract new patients. About 79% of patients consult review websites prior to scheduling appointments.

And, if you automate your appointment scheduling—which empowers patients to self-schedule their appointments digitally—this can increase your online bookings by 30%.

#2: Staffing Shortage Solved

Staffing shortages have become endemic in the healthcare industry. If you’re suffering from staffing challenges, automation addresses the three primary causes. You won’t need to devote precious staff resources to busy work, because the AI handles it. The staff whom you do hire are more productive, which means you don’t need to hire as many of them. Staff training costs drop sharply because simplified workflows are easy to learn. And because your staff’s jobs are more efficient, they are less likely to experience burnout and quit.

#3: Branding and Visibility

Automation helps improve branding and visibility by taking important provider information—phone numbers, visit reasons, procedures, addresses—and syndicating it across the internet.

Providers who enhance the patient-provider relationship via automation stand out from the competition, because the competition, for the most part, clings to legacy systems. They fear change so they haven’t yet evolved to meet the demands of modern patients.

The Bottom Line

To improve the patient-provider relationship, you can automate your staff’s workflows. If you focus on improving your staff’s experience, better outcomes will follow.

   

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