Close to Care: The Benefits of Onshore Healthcare Contact Centers

Overall patient satisfaction with their healthcare experiences matters more than ever—not only is it a determining factor for loyalty and retention, but it can also impact how likely patients are to follow care plans and experience positive health outcomes.

Obviously, then, healthcare providers should do everything possible to strengthen patient satisfaction across the entirety of the healthcare process, from appointment booking to in-person care to follow-ups and billing. And all of these things really do matter—according to recent research:

Compare this to patients who said “bedside manner” (only 49%) or “cost” (47%) were as important to their loyalty and satisfaction. The rise in telemedicine (up 337% since 2019) has also increased the need for digitally effective, easy and streamlined processes for healthcare.

Onshoring can make a direct impact on improving patient satisfaction through improved CX and streamlined communication processes. For example, we worked with one healthcare organization and were able to achieve a 14% increase in Ease of Contact Rate and a 16% increase in Ease of Scheduling Rate, as reported by patients. These improved patient experiences were tied to a scalable team, improved speed of answer and streamlined processes—and they tied directly to improved patient outcomes and increased revenue for the healthcare organization.

While other outsourcing locations may also provide similar services—answering calls, managing appointment setting and so on—the quality may not be high enough to guarantee patient satisfaction and positive outcomes.

A big motivation for many healthcare organizations in moving to onshore contact centers is benefitting from improved understanding and communication between their patients and their organization.

Today, much of healthcare happens remotely—whether that’s telehealth visits, making appointments, following up on a prescription, checking test results or something else, there’s less and less face-to-face interaction, and more interaction with your teams over the phone, web chat or other electronic communication channels.

As a result, improving communication and understanding at all touchpoints is essential to deliver a streamlined, cohesive and supportive patient experience—and something that onshoring is uniquely situated to provide the best.

With onshoring, you’ll ensure that all your agents live and work in the US, allowing for much higher levels of cultural understanding and familiarity with the US healthcare system and your patients’ situations. In addition, higher levels of English fluency allow for fewer misunderstandings. With offshoring or nearshoring, most—if not all—of your agents are likely to speak English as a second or third language, which can introduce communication problems and misunderstandings. Onshoring resolves these concerns immediately.

Similarly, while consumer trust and respect are important in all industries, there are few places where this is more important than in healthcare. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, trust in healthcare and healthcare organizations are waning—but can your contact center really help with that?

The answer is yes. With waning trust comes lower healthcare provider retention and decreased health outcomes, among other negative effects. But look at the recent data:

As the data makes clear, lost trust is a major cause for concern, with the vast majority of patients willing to switch providers after just one untrustworthy experience. However, more surprisingly, a significant portion of patient trust is not determined in a clinical setting, but based on the communication, care, and information they receive outside of their clinical care.

As a result, your contact center plays a large role in enforcing—or disintegrating—patient trust. With onshoring, you can ensure higher levels of customer trust through higher-quality communication, care and relatability.

Patient-centered communication is a common buzzword among clinicians and medical training, but it shouldn’t just be for clinical settings.

Instead, patient-centered communication should be a core aspect of your healthcare organization, stretching everywhere from the operating room or examination table to the front desk, web chat and payments call center. Creating clear and patient-centered communication at every step is one of the key elements of providing excellent patient experiences—and onshoring again can help support this.

Patient-centered communication involves focusing on active listening, empathetic responses, friendly communication practices to foster relationships, providing clear information, demonstrating respect and compassion, enabling patient understanding and agency and so on. Not only do these practices result in better health outcomes, but they also increase patient satisfaction overall.

These core practices also align with the type of care and communication that sets onshore call centers apart from offshore or nearshore outsourcing, in many cases. Of companies who moved their outsourcing operations to onshore models, 70% said it was due to the lack of quality with offshore models.

For many companies, offshoring can present fair-enough quality alongside a beneficial cost reduction. However, for something as sensitive as healthcare, fair-enough isn’t enough. Onshoring allows healthcare organizations to make use of the best talent and local resources and prioritize patient-centered communication models in every single patient interaction, increasing patient satisfaction and improving retention and health outcomes.

Another major concern with offshoring—particularly in sensitive industries like healthcare—involves compliance and regulations. When outsourcing healthcare contact centers offshore, compliance becomes difficult to manage.

This is becoming an increasing issue for healthcare organizations. In 2019-2020 alone, HIPAA found 39.82 million compromised healthcare records. Data breaches, security issues, email phishing attacks, scams—all of this is becoming more and more common, and puts pressure on healthcare organizations to increasingly prioritize security and compliance. Obviously, increased data breaches or other security incidents will tarnish your healthcare organizations’ reputation and erode the patient experience, even if the care they receive from your providers is exceptional.

As a result, many healthcare organizations are bringing all their customer data closer to home, and moving to onshore call center models. Onshore call centers are not only more familiar with US laws, more likely to be HIPAA-certified, and so on; but they also keep all your sensitive patient data onshore and close to home. When you’re not sharing patient data overseas, it becomes easier to maintain and ensure compliance, as well as prevents you from having to worry about international policies.

Finally, as mentioned briefly in other sections, onshoring indirectly contributes to better overall healthcare outcomes.

There’s a variety of factors that contribute to this:

But let’s take a look at a very specific example related directly to customer service and your contact center.

Recent medical research suggests that “missed appointments represent a significant risk marker for all-cause mortality,” indicating that patients who miss appointments—particularly if multiple are missed or the patient has mental health conditions—have up to an 8-fold increase in mortality rates compared with those who missed no appointments.

This data suggests that existing healthcare systems may not adequately support the most vulnerable populations, but that increasing positive patient outcomes can be as simple as ensuring patients have the necessary communication and follow-ups needed to make and attend their appointments. This is something that outsourcing your customer experience, appointment setting, or other administrative concerns can greatly improve.

For example, at ROI CX Solutions, we worked with one healthcare organization to improve these types of results. This healthcare system was struggling to keep up with an overwhelming call volume, which led to decreased customer satisfaction, an inefficient patient experience, a high level of abandoned calls and a high no-show rate. Our team stepped in to improve the efficiency, quality and staff size of their customer team, improving speed of answer by 99% and reducing the no-show rate by 75%. We also helped them achieve a 16% increase in Ease of Scheduling rates, as reported by patients.

At the end of the day, a cost-benefit analysis shows onshoring as a clear benefit for healthcare organizations. While opting for a “cheap” solution may work for some companies or industries, in healthcare, customer service is too important to skimp on.

The value of hiring an onshore team should be clear by this point, but the following table makes the cost and benefits exceptionally easy to see:

While onshoring is typically more expensive per-agent than offshoring, the quality, security and privacy, communication clarity, efficiency and overall value is much higher, an essential benefit for healthcare organizations. And compared to managing in-house teams, onshore outsourcing allows for much greater flexibility, scalability, operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Hear it from one of our healthcare partners: