IVR: Your Secret Weapon to Happier Staff & Increased Revenue
If you are lucky, you enjoy a dedicated staff working to interact with patients for your practice. They cannot, however, be in your office 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. For collecting payments, this is an issue. We now live in a world where we need to meet patients where they are, and when they are available.
IVR technology for healthcare organizations allows patients to interact with an automated system over the phone to do things like make a payment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without needing to interact with a live agent. They might also, for example, check their payment plan status or hear their current balance.
Additionally, during business hours, your staff can benefit from not having to take payments over the phone. The time taken to enter payment information, be it via credit card or check, by hand is both prone to error and time consuming.
So, if IVR is good for both the practice and the patient, why hasn’t your organization started utilizing IVR for collecting payments? If you aren’t convinced yet, below are some more examples of how IVR can improve your practice.
In healthcare, IVR also has these unique characteristics:
- HIPAA and PCI compliant
- 24x7 availability, including nights, weekends, and holidays
- Relieves staff from phone time to handle other patient and office related responsibilities
- Eliminates busy signals and unanswered calls
- EHR / PM software integration
- Notable qualitative and quantitative ROI
Removing Payment Friction
Even though the Internet has made our lives undoubtedly easier through increased convenience and access to information, it is not the end all be all for convenience. 25% of US seniors do not use the Internet at all. Additionally, much of the population still prefers using the phone as the preferred way to interact with a medical facility. This includes billing and payments as well.
A well-constructed IVR system used in conjunction with a communications platform is a powerful tool for being proactive in collecting patient payments in a way that reduces friction for your patient.
To learn more about CBOSS’ communications platform, CPP Flex Engage, click here.
A key differentiator here is the ability for the patient to immediately act on the information sent to them in the phone, text, or email communication. That is to say that a patient can simply press the keypad in order to act on this information by making a payment (using a new payment method or one that is already on file), or in the event of a question - transferring to a live person during normal business hours.
The ability to transfer to a live person should a caller get stuck or have a question is a key function that you should look for when selecting an IVR system. The risk of alienating callers or having them get stuck in a nested menu is eliminated with this option that is standard with Flex Pay IVR.
Increased Revenue Through ROI
Along with the benefits for patients and staff, a well thought out and implemented IVR solution has the additional benefit of actually paying for itself. This is due to reduced requirements regarding time your staff spends on the phone. It is not atypical for an IVR system to deliver 100 or even a 200% return on investment. And this is month to month, every month.
Additionally, studies show that 40% of payments received happen outside of business hours. Your IVR solution is another tool in the toolbox for making it easier and more convenient for patients to pay. What would it mean to your bottom line if you could capture even a conservative percentage of those off hour payments?
There are tools available to help you calculate the return on investment using your own numbers. Overall, the benefits that a robust IVR payment solution provides are just too great to ignore. One of our knowledgeable sales reps would be glad to show you the ROI benefits of adding an IVR system to your payment options.
Happier and More Productive Staff
If you ask staff what their least favorite part of the job is, the time spent on the phone surely ranks at or near the top. Along with good patient communication, IVR becomes another tool to help keep staff productive in more beneficial ways, both for the patient as well as for the healthcare practice.
A tool like CPP Flex Pay IVR and just like with communication, the benefits of taking away hours of manually calling patients will give your staff more time to greet patients, handle other critical office duties, and more quickly respond to a patient’s needs.
Conclusion
As we have seen above, there are numerous benefits as well as good reason for deploying a cost effective IVR solution to handle inbound payments, especially when paired with effective two-way communication. A well thought out and implemented solution frees up staff time, increases patient satisfaction, and enhances revenue.
As mentioned, there are tools available to help you calculate the cost and return on investment that can be expected from implementing this type of solution that our sales reps are experts with.
If you would like to learn more or have questions, please contact us as we are here to help. Simply fill out the form below to receive a sample ROI sheet as well as other information regarding today's modern IVR solutions and how their implementation is sure to help improve the bottom line and increase revenue from patient payments outside of the of the office.
