PDF Download It's Your Call: Mastering Telephones in Your Medical Practice, by Elizabeth W. Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, CPC, Deborah Walker Keegan, PhD
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It's Your Call: Mastering Telephones in Your Medical Practice, by Elizabeth W. Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, CPC, Deborah Walker Keegan, PhD
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If your practice is like so many others, the telephones ring constantly. Because the telephone requires synchronous communication the practice and the patient must be on the line at the same time it is inherently inefficient and has long been a source of frustration for practices and patients alike. Yet the telephone is the most frequently used means of communication for patients to access your medical practice. With high volume and high expectations the telephone is an area ripe for opportunity. This book gives you the tools you need to take charge of your telephones so you can: Optimize patient access Measure your telephones to understand their current performance Improve the management of each type of call you receive in your practice Staff your telephones to ensure that you have the right number and skill mix of staff Use telephone scripts and tools for message-taking and callbacks to optimize customer service Select a telephone system and its related components to fully leverage technology Prepare for mixed-channel communication with patients, such as texting, e-mail, and Web portal Assess whether you need a consolidated call center, and if so, design and implement one that is right for your practice The telephone is a critical access point that requires appropriate staffing and management to provide value high quality at low cost. Indeed, in some medical practices, more care is provided and/or coordinated via the telephone than ever before. Nurse triage and advice, case management, health coaching, patient navigation, and telehealth are expanding to provide patients with new access channels for care. In addition, patient expectations regarding service and turnaround times associated with the telephones are heightened, with patients requesting answers to their questions now. Gone are the days of patients telephoning the practice and being transferred directly to voicemail, which is checked only a few times during the day. Your patients expect timely and informed responses each and every time they call your practice. This book is organized to make it easy for you to access the key tools you need to improve patient communication and access to your practice. Authors Elizabeth Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, CPC, and Deborah Walker Keegan, PhD, FACMPE, have peppered the book with best practices highlighted to guide you in optimizing telephone performance. Use this book as a blueprint to measure, manage, and staff your telephones for optimal performance. Embrace the tools in this book to improve patient access by expanding to newer technologies, minimizing the need for patients to telephone your practice.
- Sales Rank: #2027021 in Books
- Published on: 2012-10-15
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .50" w x 6.00" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 188 pages
Review
To anyone familiar with Woodcock and Keegan s work, it will not come as a surprise that this book should be considered required reading for anyone involved in managing physician office operations, as telephones are the main lifeline to a practice. --William Pesanelli, mba Practice Administrator The Urology Center, PC, New Haven, CT
As a practice manager you are being asked to do more with less. Patients want to access your services quickly and efficiently and to also feel that personal touch. It s critical that you leverage technology to your advantage to enhance the human interaction. This book gives clear, concise, and practical steps to take control of your key work processes and make the most of your financial, technological, and human resources. --Donna Scowden Practice Administrator Peachtree Park Pediatrics, Atlanta, GA
This book is an excellent, practical resource guide for any physician office seeking to improve its management of phone calls into the practice. No matter the size of the practice, managing telephones is a challenge in any environment and this book breaks it down into simple and easy to implement best practices. --Courtney M. Higdon, MBA Director, Enterprise Patient A4ccess Services University of Kentucky HealthCare, Lexington, KY
About the Author
Elizabeth W. Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, CPC Woodcock is a professional speaker, author and trainer specializing in medical practice management. Woodcock has focused on medical practice operations and revenue cycle management for more than 20 years. Combining innovation and analysis to teach practice operations, she has delivered presentations at regional and national conferences to more than 150,000 physicians and managers. In addition to her popular e-mail newsletters, she has authored several best-selling practice management manuals and textbooks, and published dozens of articles in national health care management journals. Woodcock is a Fellow in the American College of Medical Practice Executives and a Certified Professional Coder. In addition to a bachelor of arts degree from Duke University, she completed a master of business administration in health care management from the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania. Deborah Walker Keegan, PhD, FACMPE Walker Keegan is a nationally recognized consultant, keynote speaker, and author. She is president of Medical Practice Dimensions, Inc. and a principal with Woodcock & Walker Consulting. With more than 25 years of experience, she helps health care organizations improve medical practice operations, enhance physician and staff productivity, and align physician compensation systems. She has developed special expertise in ensuring sustainable improvement in academic, hospital-owned, and private medical practices. She has co-authored four best-selling books: Rightsizing: Appropriate Staffing for Your Medical Practice, The Physician Billing Process: Avoiding Potholes in the Road to Getting Paid" and its second edition, The Physician Billing Process: 12 Potholes to Avoid in the Road to Getting Paid, and Physician Compensation Plans: State-of-the-Art Strategies. She is in high demand as a keynote speaker and has collaborated with Elizabeth Woodcock to offer a series of educational DVDs on hot topics in medical practice management. Keegan earned her PhD at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, her MBA from UCLA, and she is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Practice Executives. In 2008, she received the Edward B. Stevens Article of the Year Award for " Are you ready for the perfect storm? " published in the January 2008 MGMA Connexion.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Great Resource for Practice Administrators Everywhere
By Ricky S. Dean
It is easy for phone service to feel overwhelming. The key in mastering the telephones is to control the telephone process, instead of letting the process control you. Woodcock and Keegan offer a wealth of tips and process ideas in It’s Your Call, a fantastic reference work for improving phone operations in your practice.
In a world where customer service is king and social media has led to a culture of almost instantaneous responses, the telephone remains a primary contact method. For the foreseeable future, it will be a growing part of your medical practice.
The authors cover the following material:
• How to measure your telephone calls
• How to manage your telephones
• How to staff your telephones
• Telephone tools
• Telephone systems
• Call centers
One of the best aspects of It’s Your Call has to be the “Best Practices” sprinkled generously throughout the book. Things like, “Call volumes can be reduced to twice your visits,” and “Hire staff with excellent customer service backgrounds and then train for medical terminology and medical practice operations.”
The authors were kind enough to include samples of documents that can be used for measurement and streamlining current processes or establishing new procedures more efficiently. Highlighting the most crucial points in text boxes and bold print makes it easy to locate key points and guides readers to the biggest takeaways from a content rich book.
What’s Missing
The book is not without its flaws and blind-spots, however, and here are the ones I found most glaring.
• Clinical calls are crucial
Physician calls tend to be the most expensive, time intensive of all telephone contacts in a practice yet there was very little discussion of ways to improve efficiency of these calls. Despite heavy discussion on the cost of callback, there is essentially no discussion on the most expensive calls and how to reduce those costs.
• Major Metrics
The tables and diagrams in “Measure Your Telephone Calls” are neat and tidy with regard to measurements, statistics, and documentation. However, the three most important key metrics are notably absent – first call resolution, mean time to resolution, and patient satisfaction.
• First call resolution
Handling issues on a patient’s first call is crucial to improving not only the bottom line, but also customer satisfaction. How many times do you want to call for assistance before you receive the answer you need? Whether you utilize low-tech solutions like paper and pen or high-tech tracking software like Healthdesk, it is crucial that you monitor first call resolution statistics.
• Mean time to resolution
If you call and leave a message, how long do you wait for a return call before you call again? Tracking the amount of time it takes to respond to a patient message can help you identify lag times that can be improved.
• Patient satisfaction
Do happy patients leave practices? Do unhappy patients stay where they don’t feel valued? No and no, so keeping your patients satisfied remains an important part of your practice’s success. Trying brief exit surveys, web-based surveys, or immediate options via phone or email systems can provide you with the information you need to gauge how effective your staff is with regard to patient satisfaction.
• Missing Change Management
Though briefly addressed, change management is not discussed in enough detail to provide effective solutions. A change management chapter would greatly help the practice administrators who are the ones typically tasked to drive improvements.
• Start at the top - with data
Gather as much data as possible to make your case for change and share it with management.
• Find champions
Many practices have at least one provider and a handful of nurses who really care about improving service. Make them your allies.
• Engage every level in goal setting and implementation
How is your team really doing? How do you best use the information you’ve obtained? It’s imperative to find a baseline and identify where you want to make improvements.
• Identify low hanging fruit
Hiring new staff or buying new technology may be the answer, but not the place to start. Try altering workflow in smaller ways to alleviate some of your areas of concern.
• Emphasis on some high price, time intensive options
The authors advocated social media as an education and communication solution. Social media is the way of the world these days, but it is constantly changing which means continuous training and updates for your team as well as the need for appropriate tech to use the platforms. While YouTube and other social media outlets could be a boon, without appropriate tech and training it could just as easily be a bust.
• Light on the real world applications
There are a few case studies included that provided insight into real world problems but there were not enough to have the impact It’s Your Call could have had. There is something about that real world application, that relatability of the “that’s happening to me” moment. Capitalizing on more case studies could have rounded out the content a bit more.
• Callback or not? Confusing recommendations
Woodcock and Keegan recommend transitioning inbound calls to a message + outbound call workflow. But then they also frequently quote the statistic that each message costs $15. This leaves the reader without a clear guideline for when and why to pursue outbound calls versus when to avoid them.
I understand the reason for this confusion. There is a trade-off with outbound calls that is a little technical to navigate. Taking messages and calling patients back has the benefit of being asynchronous. The patient doesn’t have to be assisted at that exact moment. In a world of call volumes that really spike, parking some calls for later really helps ease the pressure off the telephone staff and reduce the queues by letting them catch up on these calls when the volume is lower.
The trade-off is that retrieving messages and calling patients back, often with phone tag, normally takes a lot longer than it would have to resolve the issue at the moment. So you buy yourself some time to handle issues at slower times at the cost of taking longer per issue to do so. I would have liked Woodcock and Keegan to provide some guidance around this trade-off.
Why it’s Worth the Read
• Measuring your efficiency
It’s Your Call emphasizes the need to measure the efficiency of current procedures and data received from test calls to your practice to determine the overall effectiveness as well as areas for improvement. Further, practices are encouraged to include scheduling in your statistics (reschedules, cancelled appointments, missed appointments, etc.) to make certain no areas for potential improvement are missed.
• Convert anecdotes to data - don’t miss out on this crucial performance data.
• Measure reasons for calls, phone quality, and determine inbound call volume.
• Create phone expectation and share them with all staff.
• Try out some Mystery Patient Surveys and Patient Advisory Groups
• Educating your patients
Additionally, It’s Your Call discusses the need for patient education and suggests the best ways (hooray for Best Practices!) to reduce calls by providing appropriate information both verbally and in written form. Did you know that people only recall a small portion of what they hear? The amount of information retained from verbal instruction decreases when the individual is under stress. It stands to reason that providing your patient with written instructions to supplement verbal input gives them the option to review the information when they have clearer heads.
• Utilize all staff
It may benefit your bottom line to consider alternative systems that utilize your non-clinical staff. Breaking from traditional procedures for handling things like prescription refills can increase your overall efficiency. A good tip here is to hire staff with solid, even strong, customer service backgrounds and then train them on the medical aspects.
• Be proactive
When can you call the patient first? Take a hard look at opportunities to reach out to your patient before they call in to ask a question. One suggestion was to address time frames discussed with patients. If you believe test results will be back within twenty-four hours tell the patient you will let them know in two to three days. This provides an opportunity to account for delays and reach out to the patient before they call in.
• Do it right the first time
Reworking is not productive. Arrange time for physicians to handle calls every day so they can handle things that need to be addressed and avoid phone tag between staff and patients. Have front line staff attempt to solve any of the patient’s issues before passing them on, they might be able to prevent a transfer altogether with a simple “Is there anything I can help you with?”
Beginning with the basics of measuring and evaluating the effectiveness of your current system, It’s Your Call examines the behind the scenes strategies that can help improve your main line of customer service and ultimately your bottom line. The authors really nail down the most effective management techniques and how to properly train your staff and implement any changes as seamlessly as possible. There is even a healthy discussion on selecting the proper phone system and lengthy chapter on call centers as an option.
It’s Your Call is a wonderful resource and guide that breaks down some of the more crucial aspects of phone systems and procedures into simple terms while providing a wealth of Best Practice tips. It may not answer all of your questions or solve all of your issues, but it can set you on the right path.
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