Selecting a behavioral health treatment program is not like making an appointment for a dental cleaning or a routine physical.
People don’t just call and schedule a date to come in.
They’re shopping.
They’re talking to at least three or four of your competitors, trying to decide on the best option.
Most of the time, they do this with limited information on how insurance works, how much it will cost, what treatment modalities are most effective, and what level of care is appropriate. To make matters even harder, people are most often seeking treatment in the midst of a personal or family crisis – and they need to make a choice quickly.
Your admissions team is the primary voice of your brand. The decision to enroll in your program largely rests on the interactions patients have with this team.
Here’s the key:
If you want their business, patients and their families must like and trust your admissions representatives more than they like your competitors’.
Census By Design has trained hundreds of admissions reps on the fundamentals of call handling and ability to adapt to the caller’s needs accordingly. We’ve developed our own approach, based on our decades of experience, and it works.
Here are the components:
Read the Call
Admissions representatives are trusted advisors to people in substance abuse or mental health crises and must be able to adapt to each caller’s needs through word choice, empathy, intonation, demeanor, and personality. While we can’t be all things to all people, a really good admission person can come pretty darn close!
Drive the Call
Admissions professionals do this work because they derive gratification from helping people access care. They may spend their entire day working on unqualifying calls if they’re not taught an efficient process. A good admissions person can qualify calls – clinically and financially – efficiently able to move through the call without being off-putting. They can determine who’s a good match and who’s not, represent your brand and deliver results without asking questions about insurance and payment too early in the conversation. Most importantly, they should never let a caller off the phone without the next step outlined. For qualified calls, they should leave the caller with homework or tasks to complete in order to be admitted to your facility and they need to follow up to make sure this work is being done!
Demonstrate Clinical Acumen
Admission to a treatment center requires the exchange of complex clinical information. In order to establish credibility with a caller, your representative needs to know the appropriate questions to ask given the individual circumstances each caller shares. Timing of questions and how they’re asked is a crucial part of building trust and rapport. If your representative doesn’t know the difference between BPD and bipolar disorder, they won’t be able to identify areas that require further assessment, or probe deeper into any inconsistencies in what the caller shares. Calls can go sideways quickly if reps aren’t properly trained about what to look and listen for. An untrained, inattentive admissions representative may allow clinically inappropriate patients to slip through the cracks and enroll in your program.
Differentiate Accordingly
People seeking help take action when they’re confident they’ve found a program that meets their needs. Your representative can make this happen. When well-trained, they can articulate and demonstrate what sets your treatment center apart from the other treatment centers, and base everything they say on what the caller offers, rather than from a canned script. This can only happen if your representatives ask good questions and have a thorough knowledge of your clinical offerings.
Navigating Insurance and Financial Negotiation
Conversations about treatment cost can be difficult. Most admissions representatives assume callers can’t afford treatment. They don’t like turning people away for financial reasons, so they’re not direct or transparent with information about cost. This frustrates some callers, and for those who are looking for reasons to avoid getting help, it gives them a reason to bolt – and hang up the phone.
Most representatives lack a comprehensive understanding of how insurance works. Therefore, they can’t instill confidence about coverage, identify opportunities for single case agreement (let alone how to successfully obtain one), or recognize strong policies. In addition, most admissions representatives lack the knowledge of what it means to meet criteria for residential treatment, and default to turning away patients that haven’t failed at a lower level of care. Building a case for residential coverage is nuanced. It requires a thorough understanding of the behavioral health space. It requires deep clinical conversation about what’s going on with the client, and the right documentation to verify everything related to care. Here’s what you and your admission team need to know: enrolling a patient in an RTC program without a failed IOP/PHP attempt is possible.
But your admissions team and call representatives need the right training to make that happen.
Extension of Digital Marketing and Outreach
Your admissions department should be a treasure trove of the data you need to make strategic B2B and B2C investments. With information captured and documented properly during the inquiry, you can optimize digital campaigns, identify opportunities for outreach, improve length of stay, and increase your collections and rate per patient per day. Census By Design can train your team to document, review your systems, and create a roadmap for the collection of this important data.
See our page on CRM customization services for more information.
Admissions work requires stamina, resourcefulness, patience, stick-to-itiveness, empathy, transparency, and oftentimes, a level of directness that can be uncomfortable for many reps, especially those who lack proper training. Therefore, professionalizing your admissions team is critical to your patient acquisition strategy.
Whether you need help with a small department or a large, centralized admissions team or call center, we have the expertise you need to optimize and professionalize your admissions department
Don’t let your rep’s flounder.
Census By Design will set your team up for success and feel great about helping more patients get the treatment and care they need.
