Mystery Shopping The Healthcare Industry A Must For Patient Retention
Mystery shopping the healthcare industry may strike some as counter-intuitive. Medicine and commerce have traditionally been mutually exclusive endeavors, but as medical practices consolidate and look more and more like regular businesses, patient retention becomes a growing factor.
The era of crotchety doctors and long waits in DMV-esque waiting rooms is drawing to a close, and many healthcare providers have embraced reputable mystery shopping firms as a partner in improving the patient experience. Here is what they are measuring:
Healthcare providers audit the appointment setting process.
Medical offices are typically a beehive of activity, and this is often reflected in the poor quality of the phone conversations we have with receptionists and other staff. Mystery shoppers are most often asked to audit the following, when calling to set an appointment with a medical practice:
Was the staffer courteous and helpful?
Did the staffer gather the required patient information?
Did the staffer ask how the caller learned of the practice?
Did the staffer tell the patient what to expect at the visit?
Did the staffer offer directions to the office? Did the staffer confirm the appointment details?
A good firm will ensure all calls are recorded so the client can hear how the call went.
Hidden video is becoming more prevalent for healthcare mystery shoppping, and gives an objective diagnosis of how your office is performing.
Healthcare providers audit the office visit.
Once the patient arrives at the office, there are many things that can affect the quality of the visit. Mystery shoppers audit everything from parking lot to the office and back. Here are the most commonly audited aspects of a medical visit:
How difficult was it to find the office?
How was the patient greeted?
How long was the check-in process?
Were the appropriate forms completed?
What was the wait time?
What was the condition of the waiting room?
How long did the patient wait in the examining room?
Were nurses and doctors friendly?
Did the doctor follow procedure in explaining the diagnosis?
Were options given?
Reputable firms offer mystery shops in the following types of healthcare practices:
Family practices
Pediatrics
PT/OT
Obstetrics
Dental
Orthodontics
Hospitals
Immediate care clinics
Cosmetic Surgery practices
There is a trend towards using independent contractors in many of the settings listed above. It is especially important to audit these situations, as there may not be as strong an allegiance from hired guns than from permanent full-time employees.
Effective Pitching Practices for Healthcare Public Relations
Healthcare public relations efforts are fueled by effective pitching and landing coverage. Through developing relationships with targeted reporters and news outlets, healthcare companies and organizations can better inform the public of their mission, policies and practices. Here is some advice on effectively pitching to health and healthcare reporters.
Find the most relevant person at the most relevant outlet. Targeting specific media outlets and specific journalists for each pitch increases the likelihood of landing coverage. Honing in this way allows for you to take a step back and really consider your audience. Who is this pitch intended to reach? What media outlets do these people pay attention to? What journalists have recently covered this topic? These are all good questions for healthcare public relations practitioners to ask themselves before pitching.
Check editorial calendars. Editorial calendars inform healthcare public relations practitioners when and what publications will be writing about. This should always be checked before pitching because they will be beneficial in coming up with the best pitching angles. To illustrate, perhaps a top healthcare trade publication is doing a special feature on heart disease. As the healthcare public relations representative for a company that specializes in treatment options for heart disease, this is the perfect opportunity to have a spokesperson provide commentary.
Break through the noise. Journalists receive numerous email and phone pitches daily. In order to stand out, your pitch needs to be creative, different and memorable. Entice journalists by playing to their interests. The reader should be instantly engaged in your pitch and want to read on. Any pitch that seems too much like an ad will likely be disregarded by journalists. To avoid having a pitch that is too self-promoting, it is important to stretch beyond and tie to a larger issue or event.
Simplicity is key. When pitching to the media, keep pitches short and to the point. The point of utilizing pitching for your healthcare public relations efforts is to get the media hooked and make them want more information from you. Therefore, there is no need to include every detail in your pitch. This also sets the stage for you to develop two-way communication and relationships with these journalists.
Through using the above tips, healthcare companies and organizations should be able to pitch more effectively and see an increase in landing placements. This will not only increase media coverage, but position health care companies and organizations ahead of the competition.
Kevin Waddel is a free lance writer. To get more information about Public relations, Public Relations New York, New York city public relations, Healthcare Public Relations, PR, NYC Public Relations Firms, Financial Services Relations in New York visit
[Top]The Importance Of Hiring A Healthcare Services Company
Healthcare management services are essential for every business. In fact, getting health care plans for your employees will help you to improve productivity, efficiency, monetary efficiency, quality, patient and clinical satisfaction. A healthcare services company will generally provide strategies to businesses to improve their revenue by cutting back on medical expenses, company and clinical processes, accomplish regulatory compliance, and optimize the employees” safety. Such healthcare managed services are especially beneficial for organizations that keep on searching into options for new wellness details systems. They help organizations to assess the readiness of their infrastructure for wellness records as well as to implement more advanced clinical applications. However, it is also essential to contemplate the healthcare services as well as the health care plans you are availing and make periodical modifications to make it go smoothly.
Dealing with healthcare organizations is a tough job as it often requires implementing alterations within your data technology department. You need to rely much on the electronic infrastructure and ensure that it is operating smoothly and there is no down time. Any organization offering healthcare managed services is aware of these kinds of challenges; however, you can overcome them with appropriate health care plans.
The healthcare services company, in general, provides required training and information to your HR team so as to help them to deal with the compliance implementations that your organization is facing. Besides, providers of healthcare managed services help you to discover new ways for enhancing the system, allowing them to lower high-priced health care plans and boost revenue. As a result, you can assist streamline clinical processes as well as enhance the general safety of your people.
If you have not yet regarded the benefits of hiring a healthcare services company, here is another factor you would like to consider. It is not always possible for your in-house HR teams to remain updated about the compliance laws and regulations, which is very much essential for managing to streamline enterprise as well as for boosting revenues. The providers of healthcare managed services can help with those things and more.
Organizations that invest in healthcare managed services for their employees make a wise investment. They can expenses and at the same time increase the safety of their people, which further helps in employee retention. So if you have not yet considered providing healthcare managed services to your employees, it is time to do so.
Moreover, healthcare services company will help you to identify the weak points of your existing healthcare managed services and help you fix them with more suitable and cost-effective health care plans. However, it is essential to opt for a quality and professional healthcare services company that will study your organizational infrastructure and accordingly help you choose the best suitable health care plans for your people.
Healthcare Softwares For Every Hospitals
Lot of companies are providing the application software in healthcare management and information system, both of which are integral and critical parts of a smart healthcare system project. The idea is to bring the functions of all departments onto a unified platform from a reporting, data collation and data analysis perspective. If healthcare system is integrated and managed through a proper information and management system, then anybody can get access of it starting from primary healthcare unit to specialty centre, both from patient care and administrative perspective. In the process , it becomes much easier for the government to provide much better healthcare services. The need was already there, but only a few states have actually come up for adopting best of IT systems for healthcare.In general terms what basically these software are based on open source software with proprietary database at the backend. The software provides most flexible options in terms of reduced total cost of ownership, maintainability , vendor independency and in addition, it runs on a variety of operating systems. From an architecture perspective , it is extremely scalable and can be easily modified.
Areas like drug and material distribution, inventorying, purchasing and facility management have largely benefited through use of IT. The application also helps to standardize and define different protocols in the system as and when required. All these synchronies towards a significant enhanced quality healthcare service. Equity issues are taken care of by the public sector for those who cannot afford. Private sector is more or less differentiator. Sixty to seventy percent of work is left on the public sector. We need to increase the spending from current 4% to at least double by that. While healthcare IT spending in most emerging Asian economies has increased appreciably, yet certain developed and emerging nations are still lagging behind. Considering the global aspect, judging by the percentage of healthcare IT spending as part of overall national IT spending, Australia tops the chart , followed by China, Malaysia, New zealand, Philippines and Vietnam. The trends and spending patterns of Australia have been found to be most typical in the region, resulting in sustained growth of the market, at a pace that is even higher than many of the currently emerging economies. Public Sector institutions continue to slog or rather decay on account of lack of monitoring mechanisms, lack of management controls system and lack of accountability. In India, public health sector sees highest absentees. Still their incentives are very high. We need to have very strong management controls and IT enabled mechanism to monitor the output. Just Deploying thousands of doctors in the rural areas such as Gujarat is not enough
Healthcare Compliance Understanding Hipaahitech Regulatory Controls
Security is a major cause of concern in today”s techno savvy global corporate environment. With organizations and healthcare facilities going towards a paperless environment, most of the information transfer and storage is in digital formats. Organizations, healthcare institutions and hospitals are faced with security challenges of their records and personnel. The need to protect the privacy of employees or patients involves a critical issue of the access to the electronic information.
Through a forward looking approach with view to address the current problems of IT compliance and security requirements of the healthcare industry and corporate sectors, various regulatory controls were put in place. This includes healthcare compliance in the form of Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, signed as a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Act, besides adding requirements for security breaches, has also laid down security standards for maintaining electronic health records. This Act also expands the privacy provisions beyond the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) Act.
Tthe HIPAA act was enacted in 1996 in the United States among other things to protect the health insurance coverage for employees and their next of kin in case of change of workplace or retrenchment. With the widespread use of electronic data exchange, HIPAA also made provisions for health care providers, insurance companies and employers to confirm to national standards in electronic health care transactions, so as to maintain high level of security. However, since the integrity of data is at risk by technological enhancements, the HIPAA healthcare act has transaction and code rules besides a number of standards and guidelines for the organizations to maintain the privacy and security of sensitive health information.
Though considered a boon to the security of healthcare information, these regulatory systems offer the entities a number of challenges too. The use of compliance management software developed by experts in the field will help organizations streamline and automate compliance initiatives. Further organizations have also made use of smart cards to identify access to the electronic documents. Such holistic enterprise-wide approach is needed for effective controls
Conformance to HIPPA/HITECH regulatory controls ensure Information security and healthcare regulatory compliance. These Acts address the security and privacy issues in healthcare industry. HITECH applies to the business associates too. Under such provisions, the business associates are also accountable for any data breaches and face penalties for non-compliance.
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