Best Practices to Improving Patient Outreach for Health Centers
Patient outreach is an essential part of the work at any health center or medical group. It’s important to be in constant contact with patients to ensure that they are getting the best medical attention and care possible. In fact, improved patient outreach has been shown to improve overall health outcomes and this is in the best interest of your organization and patients. Here are four ways to improve patient outreach at your organization:
- Invest in Outreach Staff
- Utilize Technology
- Recognize the Roles Involved in Patient Outreach
- Stay Informed
When it comes to patient outreach, this is often on the back end of many to-do lists for health centers and medical groups. Providing patient care is at the forefront, but patient outreach can actually improve health outcomes. By investing in patient outreach staff, you can ensure that your patients are being communicated with. Not only will patients feel valued and their health outcomes be better, but you’ll likely have less missed appointments as well.
When working with patient outreach tasks it’s important to utilize technology as best as you can. Empower your patient outreach employees with program manuals, a computer or tablet with a wireless card, a cell phone and a printer and scanner. These are just the basic supplies that will improve patient outreach efforts. Mapping systems and automated voice calling, answering and messaging services are more advanced ways to improve patient outreach and ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.
It is important to recognize that patient outreach has two branches, internal and external. Your internal patient outreach employees are tasked with reaching out to patients already enrolled in plans. External outreach involves reaching out to people that are not enrolled in a health plan. Be sure that your team knows the importance of both types of outreach and ensure that there are plans in place to tackle both.
Something else that is essential when working with patient outreach is staying informed. You need to read up on and educate your staff on any changing state or federal regulations. With so many changing health care regulations, it’s important to be on top of any changes and pass that information down to your employees.
Datafied Can Simplify the Entire Patient Outreach Process for You
At Datafied, we offer top-notch patient outreach services to keep in constant communication with your plan enrollees no matter the size of your organization. Whether you need follow-up calls, appointment reminders, or appointment scheduling, surveys taken, reporting or more, Datafied can help.
We understand that not every organization has the appropriate staff or the funds necessary to stay on top of patient outreach. That is why we proudly serve health plans and medical groups that just don’t have the time or resources to allocate to patient outreach. Let us handle the administrative side of things while you focus on more pertinent matters. Call us today at 800-765-7510 to get started.
