Fast Food or Retail Background, and a Great Attitude? Employee May Be Perfect for Patient Access
Top-notch customer service skills can’t be taught
February 1, 2018
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Patient access leaders are recruiting new hires from nontraditional backgrounds such as retail and food service, searching for strong customer service skills. They look for these attributes:
- Displaying a friendly demeanor;
- Offering apologies for long waits without being told;
- Remaining cheerful despite stressful circumstances.
While dining at a local chain restaurant with her kids, the cheerful attitude of the waitress caught the attention of Tanya Powell, CHAM, patient access director for Ochsner Healthcare’s North Shore Region in Slidell, LA.
The server anticipated the family’s needs without having to ask. A nearby family demanded a discount on their bill because of poor service. Next, a boisterous, noisy group sat down, but the children laid on the seats and refused to place an order.
The waitress kept smiling through it all. “She showed the utmost respect to all the customers,” says Powell.
After the meal, Powell gave the waitress her contact information and asked her to call if interested in an opportunity in healthcare. “We scheduled her for an interview,” says Powell. “She was rather new to the professional interview process, but I was very optimistic.”
The new employee developed stellar patient access skills. These include working error holds to allow release of “clean” claims and point-of-service collections. “She is exemplary in quality assurance metrics and is willing to take any shift,” says Powell. “Her excellent customer service helped us achieve top scores.”
Miranda Crawford, the registrar who was recruited while waiting tables, was thrilled to be approached for a patient access role, given her lack of healthcare experience. “Everyone was so friendly and willing to help me with learning the processes. I have been with Ochsner now for a year, and plan to be there for much longer,” she says.
Many ED registrars have a food service background at Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News, VA. These individuals are used to being on their feet for hours at a time, which works well for the ED setting.
“Retail and restaurants are the two best places for me to recruit new hires,” says Lolita M. Tyree, MSW, CHAM, patient access manager for the ED.
Tyree recently struck up a conversation with an especially attentive server and learned she was interested in a career in healthcare. “She’s been one of my best hires to date,” Tyree says. “If it weren’t for eating out that evening, we would have both missed an opportunity.”
Can’t Teach Service
At Sentara Leigh Hospital in Norfolk, VA, and Sentara Albemarle Medical Center in Elizabeth City, NC, many patient access employees have come from outside of the healthcare industry. “My philosophy is we can teach them the job but not great customer service. It has to be part of who you are,” says Mike M. Harkins, manager of registration. “I am always looking for customer service champions.”
One employee was “discovered” while working at a backed-up Taco Bell drive-through line. Despite a long line of cars filled with frustrated customers, she managed to keep them all informed and apologized sincerely for the wait. “When I got to the window, I still had to pull forward to wait,” says Harkins. Some customers became impatient and impolite. “I watched her with all the cars in front of me, and she continued to take all the flack with a smile and a kind word,” says Harkins.
To apologize for the long wait, the clerk added some cinnamon twists to the order — but not before warning Harkins that they were high in sugar in case she was diabetic. Harkins gave the clerk her business card and told her to call if she ever wanted to get into healthcare. A few months later, Harkins did get a call. “She was applying for a job with our company and wanted to use me as a reference,” she recalls. “I was happy to do it.”
On another occasion, a patient access colleague raved about the service she had gotten from a waitress at a pancake restaurant. Harkins went to observe her table service and learned she was a young single mother. “She was super friendly with a great attitude. I told her friend to send her in for an interview, and I hired her on the spot,” says Harkins.
The employee thrived in patient access and was quickly promoted, and now works in the hospital’s IT department. Another employee at a pizza restaurant was well-known for great service — she was hired, and thrived in patient access for a decade.
“I can teach them the job,” says Harkins. “I can’t teach them the warm and fuzzy customer service.”
Not Fully Automated
There is growing awareness that having a “customer mindset” is more important to today’s patient access departments than technical expertise.
“I have actually recruited from food service and retail in the past when I have seen someone with a fantastic, servant-minded mentality,” says David Kelly, director of revenue cycle at Mary Rutan Hospital in Bellefontaine, OH.
Some patient access applicants have years of experience — but something isn’t quite right. That something often turns out to be customer service. (See related story on identifying customer service expertise in patient access applicants.)
Figure Out if New Hire Is Customer Service Star (or Not)
Typical patient access applicant searches looked for people with previous healthcare experience, in either physicians’ offices or the hospital setting. The searches excluded anyone who didn’t have this background.
“This approach really limited the amount and type of applicants being received by the departmental leaders,” says Amy Sherman, director of patient access at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin.
Many applicants didn’t pass muster with the customer service that is required. For instance, staff are expected to offer a sincere welcome. Then they are expected to do whatever task is needed for the person, and end with a warm, friendly feeling. “The people who ended up being interviewed often lacked these important attributes that were needed to succeed in patient access,” says Sherman.
Meet With Human Resources
Patient access leaders met with their liaison in human resources to talk about the disconnect between the criteria used to screen applicants and the skills that were most needed. Together, they reviewed the qualities and experience that were truly important for applicants to have.
“We decided to really focus on the customer service aspect, and not the medical office experience,” says Sherman.
This important change increased the applicant pool by 300%. Patient access leaders now interview applicants from all types of industries. All have strong customer service skills in common, however.
“Over the past year, we have hired bank tellers, grocery clerks, and classroom aides,” says Sherman. It takes longer to teach technical skills to these applicants, who have never used registration systems before.
“The payoff has been new staff that know how to make people feel they matter and are being heard,” says Sherman.
These new applicants have lots of experience working with people from all walks of life. “They’re able to diffuse complicated situations,” says Sherman. “This has really improved our morale, and the patient experience.”
The most successful candidate to date came from a wireless carrier retail store. “The customer service training she received was geared toward making sales,” says Sherman. The employee had a knack for putting people at ease. She quickly established a rapport with a warm smile.
This ability transferred well into patient access, where the employee has received many compliments from patients and families. “She exudes an eagerness to assist patients, families, and colleagues,” says Sherman.
Hands-on Approach
When talking with patient access applicants, Sherman wants to see two things: They look her in the eye when speaking, and they listen to what she’s saying.
“We hired an elementary school classroom aide who is one of the most engaged, active listeners I have ever seen,” says Sherman. As a result, the employee easily connects with patients and is able to meet their needs.
The department uses these guiding principles for customer service in registration areas:
- Make eye contact with everyone you meet, including coworkers, and add a greeting and a smile.
- Escort people to their destinations, instead of pointing the way and giving verbal directions.
- Avoid texting in the hallways.
- Resolve questions and concerns yourself, without passing the buck to someone else.
Here are some examples of how registrars actively resolve issues themselves:
- A patient arrives at registration for lab draw without any orders.
Registrars don’t turn away patients or instruct them to call their primary care physician. “We will pick up the phone and do the leg work to get the order faxed,” says Sherman.
- Patients come into the financial counseling office to pay their bills, but mistakenly brought ones from other institutions or provider offices.
Registrars call the appropriate billing office and facilitate the payment over the phone. “It is a huge patient satisfier that we don’t tell them we can’t help them,” says Sherman.
Registrars use the same approach for coworkers. If someone reports that a door is jammed, for instance, a registrar pages the facilities department, places a sign on the door, and monitors the situation to be sure it’s fixed.
“We won’t point the person to the facilities department to take care of it,” says Sherman. “We take a hands-on approach.”
Monumental Gains Made
Patient satisfaction has improved noticeably as a result of the department’s cadre of customer service stars. “We have made monumental gains with our department after our last round of new hires,” says Sherman.
The downside of an extended training time is well worth it, says Sherman: “We have a better-rounded group of employees that put our patients’ needs first.”
In response to having an influx of patients on a regular basis, the department created a new registration greeter role. The hospital is on a bus route, with several retirement communities in the area. At 9 a.m. each morning, the bus drops off many patients who need services. Likewise, on Tuesdays, an influx of patients is driven from the communities to the hospital for blood work. “At certain times, we were getting slammed with patients,” says Sherman.
During the surges, registration areas appeared rather chaotic. “Our CEO at the time tasked us to come up with a way to improve the situation,” says Sherman.
This sparked the idea to have a greeter to help the newly arriving patients. Initially, patient access leadership took on this role for an hour a day each. “We had senior leaders down to managers greeting patients, and the patients loved it,” says Sherman.
The department decided it would be a great investment to create an actual registration greeter role. (See position summary in this issue.)
This gave back an hour of time to leaders who were performing this duty. “The greeter is centrally located in the middle of the first floor and assists patients as they come in,” says Sherman.
SOURCE
- Amy Sherman, Director, Patient Access, Central Vermont Medical Center, Berlin. Phone: (802) 225-7560. Email: [email protected].
New Registration Role Meets and Greets All Comers
Below is a job description of the registration greeter at Central Vermont Medical Center in Berlin.
Position Summary:
Under the general supervision of the registration manager, the registration greeter is responsible for a variety of functions related to patient registration, and directing customers to appropriate locations within the hospital campus.
Duties:
- Meet, greet, and provide information to patients, family members, and visitors in a courteous and professional manner.
- Direct customers to registration desks when desks become available.
- Direct or escort customers to hospital service departments.
- Handle patient or visitor questions and complaints in a professional, courteous, and timely manner according to hospital policy.
- Maintain stock of customer numbers and additional mailing forms that may be required from Community Relations department.
- Enter actual wait time data into Excel spreadsheet, and email the spreadsheet to supervisor at the end of every shift to be entered into data sheets for administration’s tracking tools.
- Notify staff when patients arrive to the registration department.
- Accurately correct/edit patient registrations as directed.
- Activate X-ray, same-day surgery, endoscopy, and day hospital accounts as the patient checks in at the registration window.
- Orchestrate patient flow for the registrars (remind them of breaks and lunches) and communicate any backlog to the lobby supervisor.
- Schedule labs as they come through the fax for patients.
- Verify Medicaid insurances and add the authorization numbers to the patient’s account.
Basic Knowledge:
Requires knowledge of office procedures. Must be able to deal politely and effectively with the general public. Must have knowledge of departments and provider offices to direct patients to the appropriate destination. The successful candidate will have to pass competencies for this position.
Independent Action:
Requires ability to work without direct supervision. Performs work in accordance with established policies and procedures, making independent judgments and decisions, referring to registration supervisor for decisions involving interpretation of policy.
“I have certainly seen where people have ‘the right stuff’ on paper, but the interview goes south — or they don’t make it out of a probationary period,” says Kelly.
As patient access tasks are increasingly automated, the human-touch elements of patient access are becoming more important. “As we head into the ‘future of work,’ one job that can be partially, but not fully, automated is patient access,” says Kelly. “Lots of other industries bring things to the table on this front.”
Employees from retail and food service are used to working at a fast pace, in stressful conditions, with little control over their work schedule, and with highly demanding customers.
“Many also bring cash handling experiences to the table,” says Kelly. “All of these skills translate directly to modern registration roles.”
SOURCES
- Mike M. Harkins, Manager of Registration, Sentara Leigh Hospital, Norfolk, VA/Sentara Albemarle Hospital, Elizabeth City, NC. Phone: (757) 261-8962. Email: [email protected].
- David Kelly, Director, Revenue Cycle, Mary Rutan Hospital, Bellefontaine, OH. Phone: (937) 651-6338. Email: [email protected].
- Tanya Powell, CHAM, Patient Access Director — North Shore Region, Ochsner Healthcare, Slidell, LA. Phone: (985) 646-5132. Email: [email protected].
- Lolita M. Tyree, MSW, CHAM, Patient Access, Riverside Regional Medical Center, Newport News, VA. Phone: (757) 594-3334. Email: [email protected].
Patient access leaders are recruiting new hires from nontraditional backgrounds such as retail and food service, searching for strong customer service skills. Important attributes include having a friendly demeanor, apologizing for long waits without being told, and remaining cheerful in difficult situations.
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