Erika Wilkins 1
Erika Wilkins
Instructor Natasha Summers, MSM
Principles of Management 2213
26 November 2015
Customer Service in Health Care
Customer services is a very important part of managing ongoing client/patient relationships, because they are the key to bringing in revenue. The concept of customer service is to deliver outstanding services so the customers will have a great experience. I currently work in the healthcare industry and the company that I work for is starting to have training and meetings to improve customer service to our clients to help increase our patient satisfaction levels. There are some employees who strive to help the patient by going far and beyond their line of duties, and as others are burnout and feel like they just need to get the patient in and out without really understanding the patient’s needs or concerns. Unfortunately, there is a growing concern about customer service in healthcare today. The CMS has decided to start withholding hospital’s Medicare reimbursement due to the quality of services provided to their patients. In other words, the hospital 's payments are tied into how well the patient rates their services in a patient satisfaction survey. I believe it takes more than direct patient care to deliver excellent care to the patients; it takes employees behind the scenes as well.
In many business industries such as retail, sales, and manufacturing, customer service is a must. If the mentality of ‘the customer’s always right’
In addition to the volume of patients, it is very important what kind of patients are seen by the healthcare organization, whether the patients are outpatient or admitted, and the type of insurance they have. Since Medicare
Customer service involves a consideration of what is needed to treat the customers in a desirable
SERVICE. We are committed to providing the best experience and enjoy positively interacting with everyone we meet. We genuinely care about every customer we see and do our best to find solutions to any problem that might come our way.
They will now receive payments from the quality of care they provide to their patients. Those with higher based value will receive higher payments than their counterparts (Berenson 2010). I think this is very important because the healthcare system has been volume driven for so long that quality healthcare has been an issue for quite some time. In addition to value, this would definitely improve quality and efficiency needed for better patient outcomes.
According to L. Horton, LTACHs are funded by commercial insurance, Medicare, and charity (personal communication, March 7, 2014). For claims reimbursed by Medicare, patient satisfaction survey’s or Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems/HCAHPS help determine the hospital’s reimbursement scores. Value Based Purchasing (VBP) was established by the Affordable Care Act, which implements a pay-for-performance approach to the Medicare payment system (“Linking Quality to Payment,” n.d.). This program can help hospitals evaluate the performance of the services they provide to the public. Part of the VBP plan includes a questionnaire to patients that determines 30% of the weight of the hospital’s reimbursement scores. There are eight measures included in the HCAPS: nursing communication, doctor communication, responsiveness of staff, pain management, communication of medications, discharge information, cleanliness and quietness of hospital environment, and overall rating (Grellner, 2012, p.57).
Quality patient centered care is vital to a hospital or clinic’s ability to treat whole patients. Dabney and Tzeng (2013) address the necessity to implement patient-centered care into clinic and hospital settings. The article clarifies what patient-centered care and service quality is by consolidating many works and sighting benefits medical professionals can observe in their practice.
-To consistently provide our customers with impeccable service by demonstrating warmth, graciousness, efficiency, knowledge, professionalism and integrity in our work.
Besides, the financial incentives for hospitals and physicians that belong to ACOs, Jaffery & Golden 2013, asked and then answered the question “why would providers join this program? One reason is to prepare for the future”. Fee-for-service reimbursement, which has been how hospitals get paid for their services rely solely on the volume of patient seen without taking into consideration the quality of care provided. Payers today, such as government, commercial insurers, employers, and individual consumers are now requesting on value -based-payment, which consist of delivering the highest level of care at a lower cost. The volume based system even though the traditional way of how payments are made is not a viable long-term option (Jaffery and Golden, 2013, p.98).
The United States health care system has can be assessed for quality measures in many different ways such as mortality rate or infant mortality, but the United States government often judges the efficiency of health care provider or network on the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) core measures. The reason the United States gauge health care performance on CMS standards is due to CMS is the federal governing body that operates Medicare and how the hospital will be reimbursed from Medicare patients. Formerly Medicare would reimburse a hospital based all services the hospital provided a patient or fee for service (FFS). The rising
Berwick, D.M. (1996). Quality of health care: Part 5: Payment by capitation and the quality of care. The New England Journal of Medicine, 335(16), 1227-1231.
The reimbursement method I will be discussing is the Pay-For-Performance, which is this method that provides financial incentives to medical facilities and healthcare providers to make specific improvements and/or achieve outstanding outcomes for patients. For example physicians can receive bonuses for meeting set goals for the facility such as minimizing reoccurring preventable medical issues in certain population of patients. The CMS established 4 quality measures (process measures, outcomes measures, patient measures, and structure measures) to assess the performance of providers and medical facilities and also includes penalties for poor performance. One of the quality measures (patient measures) gives the “power” back to the consumer
High quality of service is being provided to patients at low cost. The cost comparisons between Shouldice and other hospitals in Table 1
These measurements provide feedback of a patient’s experience with the care offered at a given hospital. These measurements assess a wide range of factors including interpersonal aspects of care, clarity of - and ease of access to - information provided by the physician, speed of medical staff’s response to the patient’s urgent care needs, among other factors. These measurements are used by patients in their subjective evaluation during their process of choosing a hospital for emergency care or
Customer services is a very important part of managing ongoing client/patient relationships, because they are the key to bringing in revenue. The concept of customer service is to deliver outstanding services so the customers will have a great experience. I currently work in the healthcare industry and the company that I work for is starting to have trainings and meetings to improve customer service to our clients to help increase our patient satisfaction levels. There are some employees who strive to help the patient by going far and beyond their line of duties, and as others are burned out and feel like they just need to get the patient in and out without really understanding the patient’s needs or
The ability to provide our patients with a remarkable patient experience is the number-one responsibility of our staff. Each generation has their own communication style, these styles allows them to provide a remarkable patient experience for all our patients. Without communication tools, each generation is unable to communicate to the patient.