Due to COVID-19 and the subsequent delay of elective procedures, many healthcare providers today are struggling to ensure their patient populations are getting the care they need. While online scheduling and referral coordination solutions can no doubt help improve patient access, especially as those who cancelled or postponed appointments look to reschedule, it’s the use of automated outreach combined with the ability to schedule appointments in real-time that can take it one step further and help providers close gaps in care.
Automated outreach via interactive voice response (IVR) and text messaging (SMS) is now effectively closing gaps in care and streamlining the entire scheduling process from start to finish.
Healthcare organizations leveraging automated outreach are seeing numerous benefits. Among them:
- Extended Outreach Capabilities – An automated and technologically advanced outreach system has far greater capacity to reach patients, when compared to the bandwidth of traditional call centers. The system enables thousands of automated calls per day that don’t require an agent to personally facilitate.
- Increased Appointment Bookings – Reaching more patients means more successfully booked appointments, and in turn, fewer gaps in care. Our technology successfully automates the process all the way through the booking itself, scheduling far more appointments with much less effort.
- Higher Patient Satisfaction – Automated outreach ensures that patients are notified on-time about any necessary follow-up care, and then provides the opportunity to quickly and easily book appointments that fit their schedule. This convenience and simplicity fosters patient engagement and satisfaction.
Using a targeted outreach list, an automated calling and texting system manages the bookings, coordination and follow-up, completely lifting the burden off of the organization and its call center. Additionally, this type of technology can track metrics (i.e. response rates, booking rates, opt-outs, etc.) in real-time, allowing health plans to easily identify areas for improvement and make the necessary changes to their processes. For these reasons – as well as the benefits outlined above – a growing list of both providers, payers and ACOs are choosing to employ automated outreach technology today.
Learn more about automated outreach and how it fits into an omnichannel access strategy.
