What makes a great International Patient Services Department (IPS)? How do you measure up to other hospitals in your country, region or even globally? How do you know what your competition is doing and what makes your IPS department better? What do you use to measure your success or lack of success?
As medical tourism grows, an IPS Department must make sure they are doing all they can to compete in the growing medical tourism market while increasing international patient flow and guarantying patients have a outstanding experience with positive outcomes. Implementing best practices are great, but how are your practices better?
Many great international patient service departments have lost this battle, because they never changed, and rested on their laurels. Have you gone over your procedures and made sure you are providing your patients the best experience in all the phases and nuances of treating international patients? When did you last ask, how can we improve?
A great way of measuring your success is providing every international patient with a survey regarding their stay. Making sure they all complete the survey may be a difficult task, so maybe you can provide a small gift for their time and thoughts. How much is a nice cup of coffee?
Not much, but it let's your patient know you value their opinion. Do you know how many of your patients come back for additional treatment? Maybe this year they did the right knee, but will they come back for the left knee when it requires surgery?
Have you sent your past international patients a birthday or a thank you card from all the staff, with real signatures? It's these little things that patients appreciate and keep them engaged.
As the cost and availability for healthcare becomes more difficult to obtain, insurance companies will look for Certified IPS departments in providing better healthcare to their clients in addition to reasonable and transparent rates. They will need to know that your International Patient Services Department has gone the extra mile in raising your standards and services.
Certification of International Patient Services Departments has become a valuable commodity. More hospitals are beginning to understand the need to stand above their competition and have the ability to not only to shout it to the world! But prove it to their patients by providing a great experience. Just as JCI has become a standard in hospital quality and standards, so has International Patient Services Certification or IPSC.
IPSC provides a great deal of value not only to the hospitals IPS Departments, but to their patients, by working with procedures and processes that have been proven, tested and developed by the Medical Tourism Industry, not just made up in some boardroom.
When was the last time you made a call to your competitor's hospital to see how quick they are to respond to your call or e-mail? How does their website look? Is it in multiple languages? Are there hundreds of testimonials? And when was the last time you called your own hospitals IPS department to see how they respond to your inquire?
Sometimes taking a good hard look at ourselves and our competition, helps us to better improve ourselves while helping our patients.
