Information Security Compliance Certifications

Happiness in Healthcare

When the term 'Customer Support' is mentioned, people usually do not think of the Healthcare sector because doctors are just expected to make patients healthy again. However, 'Patient Happiness' is increasingly being used to judge the quality of healthcare being delivered. Hospitals and healthcare personnel are increasing focus on patients satisfaction by improving the quality and style of healthcare they can provide. Healthcare providers have always stuck by the axiom, “The better you know your patients, the better you can care for them”. But now want to digitize their workflows so they can improve the patient experience even more.   

From simple day-to-day business operations, like a smoother billing and insurance claim process by administrators, to proactive healthcare reminders by doctors- like contacting a diabetic patient to remind them about their insulin intake - more and more hospitals would like to streamline their interactions with patients to ensure a better experience. This requires the software your professionals use to fulfill certain requirements:

  • Be safe and secure: It should comply with all regulatory requirements, such as HIPAA and GDPR
  • Be powerful and versatile: The software should be capable of serving your doctors, admin professionals as well as all of your patients
  • Be user-friendly and accessible: Capable of displaying the right information at the right time without overwhelming your personnel or patients

With a HIPAA-compliant customer support software like Freshdesk in place, your teams will only have to spend time on tasks that requires their skill. Repetitive tasks can be automated leading to increased productivity and efficient workload management. At hospitals, clinics and other healthcare institutions, here’s how different people can benefit from Freshdesk.

For Doctors and Caretakers

When patients have doubts regarding their medication, it is the attendants that help. When the admins have doubts regarding procedures or prescriptions, it is the doctors who are answerable.

Doctors, nurses and attendants tend to be the face of the healthcare experience. Being the frontline of healthcare and dealing with lots of patients everyday means their work has the greatest impact on patient happiness. So they need every help they can get with the documentation, paperwork and other tasks so they can focus on patients' wellbeing and overall experience. Here’s how a support desk can help doctors and other caretakers

Streamline patient enquiries

Doctors and caretakers not only have to attend to patients in clinics but also get updates about symptoms over phone calls or sometimes email. A lot of time and effort is spent into getting all the paperwork in order.

With Freshdesk, all these queries can be streamlined into one central system so any doctor can continue conversations across devices or communication channels with patients. Freshdesk's versatility and broad platform capabilities enable you to integrate your helpdesk with your existing HIPAA-compliant VoIP or PBX system. So healthcare providers can start off a conversation over email but switch over to phone seamlessly with Freshdesk.

Collaborate effortlessly

Sometimes doctors just need a consult from specialists in a different field before they firmly diagnose cases. Patients often get passed to a different medical expert altogether depending on their symptoms. Having all of this on record, in one place makes it easier for your healthcare team to collaborate and deliver the best patient experience possible.

With Freshdesk features like Private Notes and Forward Tickets, your professionals can have conversations with each other right next to customer queries or incidents. Professionals from other departments may be added as Watchers at any point so they have full context when consulting on specific cases. Features like Shared Ownership allow healthcare providers and administrators to work closely together to solve problems related to Billing or Appointments and so on.

Get complete context

With Freshdesk, healthcare providers won’t have to refer to different filing systems and juggle different software just to know the patient’s previous medical history. All queries and conversation histories are streamlined into one place so they can access it with just one click. Freshdesk’s “Agent Roles” also ensures that healthcare providers have the right level of access privilege before they can obtain any information.

For Administrators

Administrators in every hospital handle everything from scheduling appointments and handling patient admit procedures to negotiating insurances, patient transfers and managing rosters. With such a wide variety of tasks tying together so many different people and lives, administrators need assistance in dealing with the easier, repetitive tasks so they can concentrate on the ones that really cause an impact on patient lives. Here’s how Freshdesk can help healthcare administrators.

Make Self-Service easy

Admin teams typically end up facing a lot of repetitive questions, for example which insurance providers are accepted, which forms to fill to dispute a bill, how to schedule appointments and so on. With Freshdesk, hospital admins can create guides and FAQs for both internal usage as well as for patients so they get the answers they need faster.

Prevent repetition

Freshdesk’s powerful automations scan through every incoming query and every ticket raised. Admins can configure these automations to automatically assign these tickets to the right doctor or healthcare personnel based on the type of query it is.  These automations also keep an eye on open cases and automatically escalate issues if no one has responded to it. This saves admins from having to manage paperwork and scheduling manually.

Secure all data

Working in the healthcare sector requires every member of the team to ensure that patient data is stored securely and accessed only by people with the rights to do so. On a software level, Freshdesk has specific features that allow administrators to control access privileges for every user. Freshdesk is also HIPAA-compliant. All your patient data, conversations and histories are stored securely on Amazon’s AWS servers. So our users can rest easy knowing their data is secure.

Read our HIPAA configuration guide for Freshdesk

For Patients

Patients and people accompanying the afflicted to the hospital don’t care about the CSAT score of a hospital or any other vanity metrics. Patients focus primarily on two things - getting better as soon as possible, and navigating the least amount of bureaucracy possible to get answers from their doctors. Here's how Freshdesk can help both patients and those accompanying them.

Get answers quickly

Sometimes, patients want to quickly update their doctors about their symptoms or ask questions of their healthcare providers. They may have questions regarding their bills or about their medicine dosages. But waiting room lines, and queues in the clinic can be a major source of discomfort. Expecting them to come to the clinic or waiting room to ask such questions is also not an efficient use of the doctor’s time. With Freshdesk, patients can securely reach their doctors or healthcare providers and have their queries answered.  

Access information easily

Some queries don’t require a healthcare professional to answer. Sometimes patients would just like to access their previous bills for filing taxes. Or they’d like to know the hospital’s policies on insurance. Maybe they just want to schedule an appointment with a doctor. These actions don’t necessarily need a healthcare professional to get on the line and respond each time. With Freshdesk, you can set up knowledge bases to answer the frequently asked questions. And with a streamlined interaction history, patients should be able to access their past records by just logging into the software, no matter on which channel they contacted the hospital previously.