A Network of Health Centers with a Large Hispanic Population Sought Assistance Fielding Mental-Health Inquiries
Client Profile
Our client supports community wellness through a range of health programs and services, helping residents of all ages, income levels, and cultures live as healthily as possible. Through their proactive, preventive programs and services, they strive to help people stay healthy and well.
Client:
- Due to the span and reach of the community they serve, the sheer volume of patient phone calls cut into and often entirely overwhelmed the in-office staff’s workday.
- Phone calls regarding health insurance took a significant amount of time to complete.
- They serve a large Hispanic population, but were lacking a sufficient number of bilingual assistants to do so with proper attention and care taken for each patient.
- Many of their phone calls concern the patient’s mental health. Specific training is required to identify and act upon emergent mental-health crises.
- The daily workflow became overwhelming—so much so that their other important administrative projects fell behind schedule or went unfinished.
TeamFicient:
- We initially built a team of four fully bilingual virtual assistants to take on all of the incoming calls, set and reschedule appointments, follow up with patients, and refer patients to appropriate doctors or departments.
- Our VAs were trained by the client’s operations manager to handle mental-health phone calls. The team spent a significant amount of time shadowing the in-office staff as they dealt with mental-health phone calls in order to fully absorb the process. Our VAs began taking these calls once the operations manager was satisfied that they were equally as capable as the in-office staff.
- Our team was taught how to triage medical-health and mental-health phone calls, identify which department or service to send each call to, and direct patients to the appropriate channels.
Results:
- By fielding all patient phone calls and handling significant administrative paperwork, our VAs opened up the in-office staff’s daily schedules so that they could attend to their other daily tasks, as well as devote more time to the projects that required larger time commitments.
- Our team also generated two weekly reports: a breakdown of the numbers of call drivers, and a TeamFicient productivity map, which led to our client’s new awareness of call-driver percentages, which helped them restructure departments and resources to better serve their community.
- Our client began to include our VAs and our team’s coordinator in their weekly staff meetings.
- With all calls being handled promptly and appropriately, patient satisfaction greatly improved, especially among the Hispanic patients, who no longer encountered a language barrier to their health care.
- The client is so pleased with TeamFicient that they have added another VA to their team for a total of five assistants, and have referred us to several other practices which have since become TeamFicient clients!