Providing an exceptional patient experience is one of the primary goals for every healthcare organization – large and small. That requirement should be shared by every professional partner you expose your patients to – especially your revenue cycle management team. Yet, there were nearly 83,000 complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2020, an increase of almost 10% over the year before. These growing numbers highlight a challenge that debt collectors and revenue cycle management partners increasingly face: staying compliant with the ever-changing rules and regulations of both the healthcare and debt collection industries.
Of course, it’s critical to partner with a revenue cycle management partner dedicated to staying up to date on the latest regulatory changes. Still, an investment in technology can also make all the difference for your patients. Speech analytics technology allows first-party and third-party debt collectors to automate the process of listening to customer interactions. It extracts information from phone calls with patients, identifies keywords and phrases, and analyzes the emotional character and amount of silence in a conversation.
In short, it allows patient relations and compliance teams to monitor every call to greatly reduce compliance risk, improve agent performance, and increase recovery rates. If your current or prospective vendor does not employ it, you’re missing important visibility into the conversations their agents are having – as well as what your patients are saying.
Reduce Compliance Risk
Compliance is non-negotiable in our industry. It’s common for our agents to field over 1,000 right party contacts per month, but if you’re manually auditing those calls – let’s say five calls per agent per week – you’re only auditing 2% of the conversations with your patients. With such small sample sizes, a lot can be missed in both opportunity and issue identification. It’s often the outlier issues that cause the most headaches, the most severe complaints and expose you to the greatest risk.
Speech analytics gives us the capability to track 100% of the interactions, giving us the ability to track trends by location, supervisor, and agent on things like:
- Mini-Miranda compliance
- Right Party Contact language
- FDCPA violations
- Abusive and/or other risky language
Improve Agent Performance
Another advantage of deploying speech analytics technology (or partnering with a vendor who does) is improved agent monitoring. The platforms score 100% of calls and reveal behaviors and activities that lead to successful collections. They also help identify teachable moments for the representatives and compliance trends in the industry and capture valuable feedback from the voice of your patient.
With stereo separation and transcription, we can individually analyze agent and patient speech. For agents, we examine trends in politeness, empathy, ownership, speech understandability, and more. We can also look for language that may be higher risk and flag it for review.
Of course, it’s also worth noting that deploying a speech analytics platform has a sentinel effect on team performance as well. When the team knows 100% of calls are audited, that knowledge also drives behavior and culture. And with more dedicated and better-trained agents comes higher recovery rates!
Provide a Better Patient Experience
Based on keywords, rate of speech changes, and more, we can also detect any frustration your patient may be experiencing. Agitation, dissatisfaction, and escalation scores can be calculated and trended over time. These patterns allow us to identify opportunities for our agents to resolve calls with these markers before they escalate.
If you or your healthcare revenue cycle management partner are not yet deploying speech analytics technology, you’re leaving opportunity on the table and opening yourself up to compliance issues. At Revco Solutions it is an essential component to the patient experience, the results we produce, and the compliance levels maintained in the process. What would you like to know about your agency/patient interactions that you don’t now?
