Emphasizing Empathy to Improve the Standard of Care
Your insurance company and your adjusters and examiners specifically must juggle many priorities at one time. Holding down claim costs and ensuring claimants are satisfied are but two of these important priorities. These priorities are actually linked, and it is important that your insurance company emphasizes empathy in order to improve the standard of care for your claimants. This can bring a variety of benefits to both you and your claimants.
Improve claimant care
Showing empathy to claimants allows them to feel understood and cared for. One of the first opportunities your company has to show your claimant that you care is that initial phone call. The claimant may be frightened after experiencing an auto accident, or they may be dealing with a work-related injury. Either way, it is critical that your claims department staff members demonstrate caring and empathy for your claimant.
Claimants who feel that their claims are being handled in an empathetic way are much more likely to be satisfied with how their claim went. Over time, that improved claimant experience can translate to increased retention rates for your insurance company.
Another way your insurance company can practice empathy while assisting claimants is to greatly reduce unnecessary frustrations along their claim journey. One common hassle that can hold up both automobile no-fault and workers’ compensation claims is reimbursement paperwork.
Claimants don’t deal with this type of paperwork often, so it can feel confusing to them at first. They may not understand what to do with the paperwork and receipts from their physician prescribed services. If they don’t complete paperwork correctly or they don’t provide appropriate documentation, that can delay the administration of their claim.
Behind the scenes, this paperwork issue can also significantly reduce the efficiency of your examiners and adjusters. They would need to help the claimant track down paperwork and receipts, which draws their focus away from finishing up the claim.
These delays and the extra hassle of paperwork can add up to dissatisfied claimants. A better way to handle reimbursement for physician prescribed services is to eliminate the need for the reimbursement altogether.
This can be done through a third-party administrator (TPA) who has built up a quality network of providers along with a pre-approval process on all physician prescribed services. Once these two components are in place, your claimants won’t even have to pay out of their own pockets for the medicine or the medical equipment they need for their claim.
Working with a TPA such as Northwood can significantly improve claims efficiency, reduce claim delays, eliminate reimbursement paperwork and increase your claimant satisfaction scores by emphasizing empathy to improve care.
Increase claimant satisfaction scores
Schedule a call with Rosanne Brugnoni at 586-755-3830 ext. 3771 to explore the benefits of working with Northwood and incorporating empathy into all of your claims.