Self-service Portal for enhanced customer experience

Healthcare organizations are always under pressure due to constant regulatory changes and increasing customer and partner expectations. Some of these challenges include:

• Increasing channels for customer interaction: In this new world, the customers are interacting with your organization in several ways, be it the call center, the website, or mobile application. The challenge for healthcare providers is providing accurate and consistent information across the channels and ensuring that all types of customers can interact with your organization and easily access relevant information across the channels. This adds complexity to the healthcare IT systems.
• Sky-high customer expectations: In the 21st century, where the whole world is connected through the internet, customer expectations are higher than ever, and customers have no qualms about publicly complaining about the providers if their expectations are not met. This can seriously damage provider’s reputation.
• Interoperability: With rising regulatory efforts to make healthcare providers more interoperable, the providers require integrating data with more and more third-party intermediaries, which adds more pressure to healthcare IT systems.
• Digital natives: Younger generations prefer to engage with your organization on mobile devices. Snail mail, email, or websites that aren’t mobile-optimized just won’t do. Your mobile experience has to be seamless.

So the question that is in front of healthcare providers is how do they counter such vast challenges. The solution is simple, Self-service portals to empower customers to quickly and easily access the required information. According to a report by Gartner, 96% of the customers with high effort service interaction become is loyal, whereas the number drops to 9% of customers who have a low effort service experience. So self-service portals not only enhance the customer experience by automating the interaction experience but also reduces burden on frontline employees.

Let’s discuss now some of the important features of Self-service portals:

1. Appointment Booking: One of the major issues that patients face is when they have to go to the provider’s location to stand in long queues to book an appointment and fill those ridiculously long forms. A self-service portal will allow patients to book or reschedule their appointments online with the click of a button. It will also allow patients to fill pre-appointment questionnaires and forms at home before the visit. With Telehealth on the rise, the new age EHRs are also enhancing this ability of self-service portals to allow patients access to their online session recordings.

2. Accessing relevant documents: Self-service portal empowers your patient by providing seamless access to their medical records. They view their medical history, up-to-date prescriptions, diagnosis, immunization records, and other additional healthcare information. With e-prescription becoming mandatory in some states in the United States, the self-service portal can also empower patients to request prescriptions or refills and view and download their lab results.

3. Payment solution: With generation Z bought up in the digital payments age, the Self-service portal integrates the latest developments in the digital payment industry to provide patients with a seamless experience in managing their medical billing. It allows the patients to make payments through the portals and track their bills. It also allows patients to view download e-receipts for the payments and view their payments statements and payments schedules. Intuitive Self-service portals can also be automated to provide reminders for the upcoming payments.

4. Seamless communication: Seamless communication with patients is a key part of an excellent patient experience. Incorporating a self-service portal that allows patients to connect with you via text, message, or email is recommended. A HIPAA-compliant system adds a layer of security to this seamless communication.

Self-service isn’t the future of healthcare customer service—it’s already here. But the demand for a seamless digital experience puts additional stress on already overburdened IT teams. Comes in, Elixir, world’s first Practice Management solution built on world’s #1 CRM and cloud solution, Salesforce. At Elixir, we understand healthcare organizations’ needs, which is why we have developed for you a patient portal that enhances your patient experience by providing a low-effort service experience. Built on Salesforce’s open platform approach to API management, Elixir reduces interoperability stress on the system with coming regulatory changes.

Elixir Practice Management Suite is a comprehensive solution consisting of four modules that fit rightly into your healthcare business irrespective of your facility size and type. The Elixir Contact Center module helps in managing the entire facility census and the patient intake process. At the same time, the Elixir EHR solution aims at delivering an end-to-end seamless patient care experience. The third module is Elixir Billing, and it effectively fetches data from any EHR platform to process medical claims and manages the entire revenue cycle. Elixir Patient Portal is the last module, and it provides an integrated experience for the patients.

Do fill out this contact form if you feel that Elixir will be an asset to enhancing your patient experience.