According to the National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), labor costs add up to about 56% of all healthcare facility expenses. This includes paying wages and benefits to workers.
Depending on demand, you will need to employ enough staff to meet both your patient’s expectations and your operational needs—without overworking them. However, staffing fluctuations come with their own long list of operational costs, including finding, training, and hiring new staff as needed.
A healthcare workforce management solution will help you increase patient satisfaction while minimizing overhead costs. By working with a management team, they’ll help you with everything from scheduling patient appointments to analyzing your operational costs to see where you can save money.
With this type of solution help, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions that improve productivity and positively affect profits and patient outcomes. In this blog, we’ll explore healthcare workforce management solutions and their benefits.
Why should you choose a healthcare-specific workforce management solution?
A generic workforce management tool is wide-reaching, combining many industry requirements into a single solution. However, with healthcare-specific requirements such as Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Service Level Agreement (SLA), you may find yourself spending more money to customize your tool and meet your needs.
By exclusively considering healthcare-specific providers, you’ll be able to meet your practice’s needs more efficiently. You’ll eliminate custom modifications, integrations, or unnecessary features. Let’s get into the top benefits your medical practice will experience by adopting a workforce management tool specific to healthcare.
Top 5 benefits to using a healthcare workforce management solution
1. Improve labor costs
As previously stated, labor costs take up a large portion of your practice’s expenses. Workforce management solutions help reduce these costs by providing a scalable team of patient care specialists. You can easily bring on more members during busy times or scale back as you experience changes.
These specialists will free up your full-time staff’s time by scheduling and following up with your patients, retrieving medical records, assisting with data entry or billing, and more.
Additionally, these management tools often include workforce optimization and back office support. This frees your staff to perform other critical duties and overall increases productivity.
At CCD Health, our medical contact center and knowledge process outsourcing are known to help reduce your workforce costs by 40%.
2. Increase patient satisfaction
Patient satisfaction and retention are essential to the overall success of your practice. No-shows and unhappy patients eat at your bottom line. To combat this and provide an exceptional experience, it’s important that your full-time staff isn’t overworked.
The patient care specialists will reduce call times, answer questions efficiently, follow up with your patients, and retrieve any necessary medical information to make the visit go by smoothly. Overall, they help provide a great first impression before your patients step foot in your office.
While there are a wide variety of workforce management solutions out there, nearshore call centers like CCD Health come with a host of additional benefits, including multilingual service.
3. Eliminate manual processes
Paperwork is the root cause for so many frustrations, including slowing down your work and manual errors. Not to mention that papers can go missing easily, taking up more time. A tool with a digital platform will solve your time-consuming manual problems. Your team can easily keep track of their own schedules, and you can easily manage their time and work from one place.
By moving everything to a secure digital location, your staff will also cut down on errors. It’s much easier to catch the wrong information with a computerized system versus something written on paper. Instead of trying to decipher poor handwriting, the information is readily available and easy to read with digital access.
Additionally, your staff can look up your patient's history in a few clicks and streamline communication within the practice.
4. Streamline staff medical process
A time-consuming part of your staff’s job is tracking down patient medical records. However, with a healthcare workforce management solution, you’ll gain a streamlined process and patient care specialists who can help.
Everything from data entry, record retrieval, claims processing, billing, and insurance verification can move from your full-time staff’s plate to the specialist. Additionally, you’ll be able to easily view all these patient details when needed.
5. Optimize with analytics
A good healthcare workforce management like CCD Health will include analytics and business intelligence that your practice can use to your advantage. The right solution will help you understand the data you practice collects and turn it into actionable items.
You will be able to view staffing performance insights that will help you drive maximum productivity. Data on patient satisfaction will help you see blind spots and increase training or make tweaks in the patient’s experience. You can see volume forecasting and plan your resources to meet upcoming demand.
All in all, these actionable insights will help you conduct quality assurance to make sure that both your staff is happy and your patients are satisfied.
Managing your workforce with CCD Health
If you are looking to improve patient satisfaction and control your overhead costs to maximize profits, invest in a trusted healthcare management solution like CCD Health.
CCD Health is the leading medical call center for outpatient healthcare providers, offering exceptional patient and customer experience. Our team of over 1,000 patient care specialists works as an extension of your practice, taking tasks off your staff’s plate and assisting patients where needed.
If you are ready to increase operational efficiency and turn your client's support into a competitive advantage, get in touch with us today, and we’ll help you make it a reality.