As part of a patient-centric approach to billing and collections management, some health care facilities have availed themselves of a new tool that tracks social media feedback about hospital experiences. It's become commonplace for individuals of all ages to tweet about their interactions with hospital staff, the quality of care and other pertinent areas of their health care experience. Crowdclinical.com was created to track hospital "trust and satisfaction" by analyzing these tweets.
"Analyzing over 400,000 tweets from September 2012 to October 2013, the site flagged messages that expressed an emotion one way or another and created an algorithm to tag them, creating a database that showed the overall patient experience based on the outpouring," explains Healthcare Finance News.
Some facilities may have lower engagement on social media than others. Nevertheless, the site's findings show that there are more ways to assess the patient experience than through simple out-take questionnaires. Individuals are expressing themselves across the internet in ways that reflect positively or negatively on the treatment they receive at medical centers.
Social media activity may also reveal questions, concerns and uncertainties that put a damper on the hospital-patient relationship. Harnessing the power of the internet to improve the patient experience is one way to reduce that friction.
While some may look at this method as a PR tool, others glean significant feedback about the impressions they leave patients with after care has ended. Those impressions can be critical to guiding patients through the billing, payment and collections process. When the patient experience is at the center of revenue cycle strategy, mobilizing individuals to make wise financial decisions becomes a little easier. Many facilities also outsource receivables management, which reduces the burden on individual administrators.
