Dignity Rating
Optimize Your Revenue Cycle With a Focus on Patient Dignity & Retention
Your revenue cycle can’t be optimized unless it’s treated as a tool for patient retention. Every patient touch point is an opportunity to build loyalty and increase the probability they will utilize your services in the future.
Inversely, even patients that had an exceptional experience with your medical staff can be lost to the competition if they become dissatisfied with your revenue cycle processes.
Dignity Survey: The Easy-to-Implement Step That Increases Patient Satisfaction
In managing revenue cycle processes for our clients, RevCycle discovered there is a simple step that can almost instantaneously increase patient satisfaction. This step is the implementation of the Dignity Survey.
The Dignity Survey has two elements:
Make a Commitment
Make the patient aware of your commitment to maintain his or her dignity. This should be done near the beginning of each patient interaction.
Our staff at RevCycle uses this statement:
“My goal is to treat you with respect and to maintain your dignity during each and every communication. If you will allow me, I would like to ask you to confirm if I have been successful at the end of our call today.”
We have found that just this first element works wonders on multiple levels! This statement serves to disarm an initially frustrated patient and helps set a positive tone for the remainder of the call. Also, our staff members find incredible value in this statement in helping them remember that this is their top priority as they work with difficult patients.
Even during the most challenging patient interactions such as bad debt collections, the benefits of delivering this message are staggering. For example, the percentage of outbound phone attempts in which the patient hangs up on us has dropped by over 75% since the implementation of our Dignity Survey.
Collect Data
The second element is to collect data on how the patient felt about the interaction.
Our staff at RevCycle asks:
“As I stated at the beginning of the call, my goal has been to treat you with dignity and respect. Have I been able to accomplish that for you today?”
The results are documented by our staff and also verified by our speech-to-text call analytics software.
The combination of these two elements not only results in an inherently better patient experience, but also provides you with a mechanism to focus your process improvement efforts.
