Healthcare Contact Center Best Practices to Improve Patient Experience and Efficiency

The contact center is the front line of the patient experience. In today’s dynamic healthcare environment, customer expectations are higher than ever for fast, accurate, and empathetic communication. Adopting best practices in your healthcare contact center is crucial to ensure high-quality patient care, operational efficiency, and trusting relationships with patients.

Intermedia is a business communications provider that specializes in Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant solutions for healthcare organizations. Our cost-effective contact center enables you to offer better, faster service and personalized interactions. Here, we discuss six best practices you can adopt in your healthcare contact center to elevate the customer experience and optimize your operations.

Unique Challenges of Healthcare Contact Centers

As with any contact center, healthcare contact centers have unique challenges, including managing call volume and wait times and safeguarding patient data. These can be barriers to providing exceptional healthcare and giving patients a personalized experience where they feel heard and cared for.

Managing High Call Volumes with Limited Staff

There are many reasons your contact center may experience a high volume of calls. Whether it’s due to delays in claims processing, open enrollment, or pandemics, a high volume of calls can lead to increased wait times and decreased patient satisfaction, especially when you have limited staff.

Self-service technology, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven chatbots, automation, and auto-attendants can help healthcare contact centers manage this challenge through online appointment scheduling, automated prescription refills, and dedicated FAQ support. This technology can help reduce the number of calls you receive without diminishing the quality of patient care.

Implementing HIPAA Compliance and Patient Privacy

Protecting patient privacy does more than build trust—it’s the law. Compliance regulations protect sensitive data and ensure that healthcare providers and contact center agents follow the law. You must comply with strict regulations and implement robust security measures to prevent data breaches and protect patient confidentiality. Any breach can have serious legal consequences and damage your reputation.

Managing these strict regulations while balancing patient care is an ongoing challenge. Using a compliant platform with built-in security and encryption measures can help. Agents can respond to patient inquiries without worrying about unauthorized access.

Balancing Speed with Compassion

Healthcare contact centers need to answer calls and respond to patient questions in a timely manner. However, agents must also offer compassion and empathy. Balancing the two requires a multi-faceted approach that focuses on technology and training.

You can implement chatbots and virtual assistants to handle routine questions, including billing concerns and appointment scheduling. This frees up your human agents to focus on high-value and emotionally charged interactions that require a human touch. These tools can also be used to gauge patient emotions during interactions, allowing agents to adjust their approach.

You can also use advanced call routing systems to prioritize calls based on urgency. Additionally, integrating your call center with electronic health records (EHRs) allows your agents to access patient information in real time. This integration enables agents to offer personalized customer support.

Handling Urgent vs. Routine Requests

Healthcare call center agents must regularly field both urgent and routine requests. This range of inquiries requires specific training to ensure that all calls are handled with the same level of professionalism. Additionally, thorough training can ensure that agents can effectively route calls to the appropriate provider when a patient exhibits emotional distress.

Some successful ways to overcome this challenge include:

• Developing specialized teams with expertise in specific areas
• Creating comprehensive decision trees for common calls
• Implementing documentation systems to track resolutions
• Providing agents with access to clinical resources
• Outlining the referral process 
• Setting up an automated process for insurance verification and appointment scheduling 

Enabling Multichannel Communication

Today’s patients want to be able to interact with your contact center in a variety of ways, including phone, email, SMS, and portals. No matter how a patient contacts you, the interaction needs to be consistent. Leveraging a cloud-based communication platform enables you to provide high-quality service across every touchpoint.

Best Practices for Optimizing Your Healthcare Contact Center

By prioritizing these best practices, you can enhance patient satisfaction, streamline communication, and ensure compliance with healthcare regulations and standards.

Prioritize HIPAA Compliance

HIPAA compliance is essential in the healthcare industry, both for providers and those who handle sensitive patient information. By protecting patients’ personally identifiable information (PII) and protected health information (PHI), you can maintain patient trust and meet legal standards. Prioritizing HIPAA compliance reduces the risk of data breaches and helps you avoid costly penalties while fostering patient confidence.

To prevent accidental data exposure and unauthorized access, you should:

• Utilize vendors that sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA): This legally binding contract outlines the responsibilities of both parties in protecting and securing patients’ PHI.
• Encrypt patient communications: You want to encrypt data that’s at rest and in transit and enable strict access controls.
• Conduct regular training: Train your desk agents on HIPAA compliance and emphasize secure data handling practices.
• Perform regular audits: Regularly auditing your HIPAA practices, including secure agent desktops and voice recordings, helps you identify and resolve compliance gaps.
• Use a trusted HIPAA-compliant vendor: Intermedia’s contact center solution includes HIPAA-compliant call recording and secure data handling.

Train Agents for Empathy and Accuracy

Rigorous training prepares your agents to handle calls with empathy, accuracy, and expertise, which are crucial for patient satisfaction and safety. In your comprehensive training programs, you’ll want to cover HIPAA compliance, medical terminology, emergency protocols, and documentation best practices. This allows your agents to be equipped and prepared to respond to patient needs.

Consider the following training methods:

• Invest in regular training for handling sensitive situations
• Teach agents how to de-escalate and triage
• Provide scripts, decision trees, and escalation workflows

Implement Intelligent Call Routing

Intelligent call routing and clear protocols ensure that agents handle patient calls consistently and professionally, regardless of the situation. Use standardized scripts, provide triage guidelines, and outline escalation processes to help agents manage emergency and routine calls confidently.

These defined protocols provide after-hours clarity and follow-up scenarios to ensure that all interactions meet your standards and enable your agents to do the following:

• Route inbound calls based on caller needs, provider, language, or urgency
• Reduce wait times and transfers
• Improve first-call resolution

Leverage Omnichannel Communication

In today’s digital age, patients expect seamless communication across multiple channels. By leveraging omnichannel communications, you can deliver a consistent user experience across multiple touchpoints, including email, chat, text messaging, social media, and voice. Intermedia supports multichannel communication in a single, integrated platform to improve patient access. Our platform ensures unified records and consistent responses across channels.

Use Analytics to Improve Performance

You can track key metrics like first call resolution (FCR), call resolution time, average handle time (AHT), call abandonment, and patient satisfaction. By measuring these key performance indicators (KPIs), you can improve them to increase patient satisfaction, decrease stress, and identify bottlenecks and pain points.

This data can help you monitor agent performance and refine your staffing schedules to ensure you have adequate staff at all times. These data-driven insights can also help you define your call flows and improve your training to increase efficiency and the overall experience.

Support Remote and Hybrid Contact Center Teams

In today’s work environment, you must be able to support remote and hybrid contact center teams. A virtual cloud-based contact center enables you to provide secure access for remote access with built-in security and compliance. Intermedia’s cloud-based Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) allows your teams to work remotely without compromising security and patient information.

Additionally, our offering helps your communications records stay organized in one convenient location while enabling multiple channels for patients to contact you. Agents, supervisors, and directors can access essential data, protocols, and workflows wherever they are. Our solution is also scalable and flexible, allowing you to meet surging demands. A virtual contact center lets you bring on more lines and remote staff without the restrictions of in-house call centers.

How Intermedia Helps Healthcare Contact Centers Thrive

Intermedia helps medical call centers thrive through a robust communications platform. Our turnkey solution for the healthcare industry is HIPAA-compliant and protects patient data through state-of-the-art encryption, access controls, and multifactor authentication. Our integrated CCaaS solution is tailored for healthcare operations and seamlessly integrates with your EHR, scheduling, and CRM tools.

This integration makes the onboarding process easier and creates minimal disruption to your daily operations. You can also use your existing infrastructure, desk phones, and phone numbers, saving you time and money. Additionally, our secure platform allows for voice, audio, and SMS messaging, enabling patients to interact with your agents in a variety of ways.

With our flexible call routing and real-time dashboards, you can track KPIs, improve your performance, and deliver consistent and high-quality interactions. These tools enable your agents to triage and escalate calls effectively, ensuring patient needs are met promptly. Finally, with our 99.999% uptime SLA and 24/7 U.S.-based support, your contact center is always online, so patients can reach you when they need to. 

Ready to Transform Your Contact Center?

In the healthcare sector, patient-centric interactions and secure contact center operations are crucial. Best practices for healthcare call centers emphasize prompt response times, empathetic communication, and strict adherence to privacy regulations. These practices ensure patients feel respected, heard, and cared for during every contact with your center. Implementing these standards can improve both patient satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Intermedia elevates healthcare call centers by providing HIPAA-compliant contact centers with built-in security measures. Our experience in this regulated industry allows us to meet your high standards and stringent industry requirements.

Our cloud-based healthcare communications platform is purpose-built to support modern healthcare contact centers. With our secure healthcare call center solution and a focus on professionalism, we can help your call center representatives handle patient inquiries promptly and effectively. By using our platform, you can reduce wait times, address patient concerns, maintain confidentiality, and build patient trust. Our call routing and capabilities also ensure seamless hand-offs during the escalation process.

Are you ready to transform your contact center? Request a call back today to learn how our unified communications system can help your call center deliver exceptional patient care with every phone call. 

Rob Oscanyan

Robert Oscanyan is a Senior Director of Product Marketing at Intermedia, where he focuses on helping businesses improve their customer experience using Intermedia's award-winning cloud communications solutions. Rob has over a decade of experience spanning market research, messaging, and elevating the voice of the customer. In his free time, he constantly creating new adventures with his wife, seven kids, and a small army of pets.