Marketing your treatment center, qualifying leads, and getting them to your team isn’t worth anything unless they’re connected with care. If you’re looking to streamline the admissions process at your rehab center, you’re likely struggling with one that’s broken now, making it hard to keep your census populated.
What could your ideal admissions look like?
Ready to improve the admissions process for your rehab center? Great—how are you going to start? If you’re getting ready to adopt new software for your team, think of how they’ll use it. Here’s one possibility:
| Stage | Trigger | Software Actions | Staff Actions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial contact | Client/family calls, completes web form, or is referred |
|
Admissions staff gathers/verifies: demographics, insurance, reason for treatment, and urgency. |
| Pre-screening & clinical review | Intake form is submitted, and insurance is received |
|
Clinical/medical director reviews for fit in program. |
| Pending decision | All info received, but no admission |
|
Admissions rep completes follow-up calls. |
| Admission coordination | Client agrees to treatment; final clinical/financial checks completed |
|
Confirms admission date with client, books transportation. |
| Admission | Client arrives |
|
Clinical staff completes vitals, labs, psychosocial, and history. |
How close is this to your current practice? If it’s a far cry from it, you should take a look at what’s slowing your team down.
What’s breaking the admissions process?
Getting patients through your door gets them the help they need—and keeps you profitable. When your admissions process breaks down, you lose the chance to deliver the treatment that your providers are best at. For many treatment centers, problems arise from a handful of key issues—poor lead tracking, lagging insurance verification, disjointed communication, and manual workflows.
Fixing admissions starts at the first touch
Improving your admissions process requires attention, better tools, and, sometimes, training. Your teams should treat every new contact as an opportunity to provide potentially lifesaving treatment.
Lead tracking
When someone completes your online contact form or calls your treatment center, how is their information being recorded so you can follow up? Is it?
Knowing where your qualified leads are coming from gives you a better understanding of which channels you should focus on—and how they are interacting with your company. Your business management software should be automatically logging calls, form submissions, and referrals with options to categorize them by urgency, source, and clinical complexity.
Insurance verification
As important as the services you provide are, you can’t continue delivering them without reimbursement. How long is your team spending just verifying insurance benefits every week?
Automatic insurance verification should be built into the software your teams—and potential clients—use. That way, they can know who is eligible for treatment from the very start. By reducing financial barriers for qualified individuals, you give them an easier route to completing admissions.
Communication
The decision to enter mental health or substance use treatment is a delicate one. A bad experience can quickly deter someone from continuing.
Your admissions teams should know how to talk to people who are experiencing some of the worst times of their lives. They should also have the tools they need to follow up with them if they’re not able to commit to treatment right away. Email, text, and phone campaigns can re-engage qualified leads after first contact. Better yet, there are opportunities to automate some of your outreach efforts.
Manual and redundant workflows
If your office staff—or worse, your clients—is spending time asking for information from different departments or doing redundant paperwork, your systems are lacking.
When your teams need to do paperwork that affects a potential client’s chart, there’s no reason for it not to automatically update in the right places. Plus, software with role-based access lets the right people access the right documents without having to chase it down.
Your tech can drive better admissions performance
Better business management software can improve your admissions performance. Some of the things your team is struggling with simply boil down to the tools they’re limited to using. A good customer relationship management (CRM) platform can give your teams access to tools like:
- Automated intake forms
- Referral source tracking
- Instant benefit checks
- Status dashboards
- Follow-up campaigns
How would you leverage new tools in your workflows? Better yet, how much more could your teams get done by making them better prepared?
Sunwave Health brings it all together
From the first touch in our CRM for rehab centers to alumni coordination, Sunwave Health gives you control over your patient information—all in one place with role-based access. Track your leads with ease, get notified when clients or leads are at risk, and see what you need when you need it with actionable dashboards and reporting. Call 561.576.6037 or contact us online today.
