Improving the patient experience is a journey, not a destination. Along the way, State Collection Service has made strategic choices in the people and technology we invest in to support your health system’s mission, vision, and values, around the patient experience. Our strategic partnership with CallMiner has brought client-specific scorecards for each call, developed client-specific measures on script/call guideline adherence, and improved the use of empowerment language across the call center.

We continue to heavily invest in the future of speech analytics with our commitment to real-time call analysis, coaching, and agent assistant tools. Continually improving the patient experience is our goal. The reason we are making these investments in the patient experience is the tangible results our clients have received from this technology being so prevalent in our daily operations.

Dawnita Bell, Manager, Patient Accounts & Inquiry at UW Physicians, in Seattle, Washington, supports the use of speech analytics with her self-pay receivables by explaining what she has used this technology for within her system’s revenue cycle operations – “I love that State uses CallMiner to monitor the quality of calls. They deliver exceptional customer service to our patients, and this is just one of the tools they have access to, to deliver that. I wish I had that for my own call center! I love being able to ask for specialized reports such as one I recently requested to monitor new language I added to our statements. It helps monitor ROI on specific changes.”

While Dawnita has recently measured a change she made in her statement process through speech analytics, another client, Kathy Kuri, Director of Customer Service and Revenue Cycle Operations Integrity for Ascension-Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare, has found value in the listening sessions that are held with her team where calls are reviewed and process improvements are identified to enhance the patient experience.

Kathy discusses the routine listening session process by saying, “Listening sessions give us an opportunity to collaborate with State to improve processes, workflows, and overall customer service. We do a root cause analysis of each of the selected calls and determine next steps. The meetings allow us to talk about not only fixing the issue for the one patient example, but also how we can fix things so no other patient has that same issue. We look at the sessions in terms of how we can make process improvements and help our patients so they don’t need to call.”

Further commenting on how to get value out of the listening sessions, Kathy stated, “We have leadership present at the meetings not only from customer service, but also other revenue cycle departments. This makes it possible for us to talk through all aspects of the patient’s financial experience. We have made many improvements as a result of the listening sessions. This transparency is extremely important and valued in our partnership with State.”

Both Kathy and Dawnita have committed to an open communication process regarding call handling and how to continually improve for the patient, and that has led to strong patient satisfaction scores on calls handled for both of their health systems.

Since 1949, State Collection Service has provided quality collection service to countless healthcare organizations.

Through experience and innovation, State Collection Service has grown to become a tremendously credible and nationally-recognized collection agency offering services from pre-registration to bad debt. It is upon the basis of ethical behavior and a dedication to integrity that each State Collection Service employee works to uphold the company’s vision – Partnerships for a Lifetime.

*This article first appeared in “A State Collection Service, Inc. Newsletter Volume 22, Issue 4, Fourth Quarter 2016”