OZH STAFF
Be Our Guest
REGISTRATION STAFF SETS THE TONE FOR PATIENT EXPERIENCE
BY DWAIN HEBDA PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES MOORE AND JASON MASTERS
I
t’s the little things that set winning organizations apart from the com- petition, details that enhance the customer experience. For Ozarks
Healthcare, that difference starts the minute a patient and their family cross the threshold. They are greeted warmly, checked in quickly and moved to the right department without being made to feel like a number. Managing patient traffic in a compas- sionate, caring manner is as much art as science and the daily mission of Ozarks’ friendly, capable registration team led by Melody Simpson, patient financial ser- vices director.
“One of the things that we try to do when
we’re training and talking to the staff is to have them put themselves in the position of the patient,” Simpson said. “This patient is put into a position that they didn’t plan for. They didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘I think I’m going to have a heart attack.’ You don’t plan those things. They’re in a circumstance that they don’t expect. “We teach every one of our employees to put themselves in our patient’s life and also think about how for some people, the only human interaction they have is when they go to the doctor or the grocery store. Sometimes patients just want someone to hear their story.”
One of the things that
we try to do when we’re training ... is to have them put themselves in the position of the
“
patient. This patient is put into a position that they didn’t plan for.
- Melody Simpson - Patient Financial Services Director
” 32 32 | OZ OZARK OZARKSZARKS HEAL OZARKS HEALTHCARE | FALL/WINTER 2022 KS HEALTHCLTHCARECARE ALTHCA FA FALL/W N FALL/ALL/WINT/WIINTERNTER 2022022
The registration team is made up of about 30 Ozarks employees backing up a client-facing corps of volunteers. The team is positioned strategically at four locations: the new medical office building, oncology, surgery area and emergency care. In addition to the human touch, the hospital has equipped the team with tech- nology that speeds the registration pro- cess, with more to come. “We have implemented a centralized scheduling system; we all register patients the same way, and we try to streamline in- formation so we don’t continue to ask the same questions over and over again,” she said. “For a patient that comes in a lot, that really simplifies the process. We have also recently put in place a tracker that ‘sees’ our patients through our system so when we hand them off, a provider knows they have X patient waiting in the lab. “One of the things we’re working on in the future is to allow patients to check in prior to getting here, whether it be through their phone system, their computer or on a kiosk. You can do certain things on our portal now, and there are a lot more of those features coming in the future.” Simpson, who’s led the registration team for about a year, also heads the financial services department and she’s leveraged that experience to further speed parts of the registration process. “The ability to verify patients’ insurance and ensure everything there is correct is very vital,” she said. “Something we have ini- tiated recently is our e-forms where, instead of handing them a stack of paper, we just hand an iPad or tablet to the patient or their family, and they can sign their forms right there. And then we save them electronically into their electronic medical record.” However, as Simpson is quick to point out, none of these technological tools will replace the human element of the registra- tion process, nor will they be as effective without it. That’s why Simpson and her team look for certain intangibles when hiring or taking on new volunteers. “What I try to teach my managers, who help a lot in the hiring phase, is we can teach someone how to be a registration clerk or how to be a biller. We can teach
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