HIPAA-compliant healthcare webchat tools: Find the best fit for your practice

Many healthcare businesses face the challenge of converting prospective inquiries into regular patients. Even with top-notch facilities and excellent doctors, success isn’t guaranteed. The major challenges include standardizing care, enhancing patient engagement, and understanding the factors that drive patient loyalty. One effective solution is to implement healthcare-oriented webchat systems, which can help overcome these challenges and improve patient conversion rates. 

Webchat solutions cater to patients outside of working hours, quickly resolve common queries, and assist in appointment/payment processes, vastly improving the patient experience. 

However, the healthcare industry faces unique challenges in security, privacy, and data management, making it difficult to find the right webchat solution.  

This blog post serves as the ultimate guide for healthcare brands, highlighting the features and benefits of an ideal webchat solution. 

Benefits of a healthcare webchat solution 

In addition to providing an easy way to communicate with leads, existing patients, and other website visitors, healthcare webchat solutions have the following benefits: 

• Increased patient satisfaction and loyalty: Easy access to appointment scheduling, customer support, and query resolution significantly improves patient satisfaction. Patients choose practices that value their time, simplify processes, and focus on providing a superior patient experience. 
• Improved conversion rates and lead generation: An active live chat tool on your website helps generate leads and improve conversion rates. It can capture lead information and provide details on working hours, doctor availability, and treatments. This improves the onboarding process and helps you outshine your competitors. 
• Streamlined communication and reduced wait times: Crowded and chaotic waiting rooms are hard to manage and hamper patient management. Streamlining appointments with intake form collection reduces wait times and helps you manage a higher volume of patients. 
• Real-time support: Many calls to your reception are non-emergent and can be better handled through webchat, reducing call queues. This allows your team to focus on urgent cases, significantly improving patient care and the overall experience. 
• Cost-effective solution compared to traditional methods: Growing healthcare businesses must manage higher call volumes without impacting their budget. Automated and AI-driven webchat solutions can provide the same service with higher efficiency at a competitive cost for your brand.

4 use cases for a webchat solution in your healthcare business

On the face of it, a webchat solution is a simplistic patient communication management and customer service tool for a healthcare business. However, it can do so much more. A few of the widespread use cases for healthcare webchat solutions are: 

1. Lead generation 
2. Appointment management 
3. Online consultations 
4. Patient history collection 

Each of these functions is essential for building and scaling a successful multi-location healthcare practice. Let’s explore them in detail. 

Lead generation

If you’re struggling to turn web visitors into clients, a webchat solution might be the answer. Patients often use online channels like web searches, social media platforms, and instant messengers. Live chat software helps prospective patients get their questions answered quickly, making them more likely to engage further with your business. 

“ We knew the power of chatbots in generating sales, but we were apprehensive about using chatbots to convert leads, and that’s when we found Birdeye! Traditionally, people would use the phone to reach out, but with Birdeye, we’ve offered a great HIPAA-compliant Webchat platform that helps us accelerate that connection.”

Steven Greer, COO of Genesis Counseling Center

Appointment management 

The next step in converting a potential lead into a patient is to offer an easy-to-use, HIPAA-compliant appointment management system. A Birdeye study reveals that healthcare businesses handle ten or more appointments daily, generating over 90% of their revenue from these appointments. This underscores the importance of efficient appointment management. 

Webchats can help healthcare providers book slot-based appointments, confirm work timings, and draw information from existing appointment systems to communicate with patients. This allows for efficient patient care management against the traditional call-and-wait method. 

“We’ve doubled our monthly new client appointments, all thanks to Webchat. The ability to reach out to each website visitor and answer questions wherever I am, at any time of day, is a total game-changer.“

Jason Hartline, Skin Spa Med

Online consultations

Patients often struggle to choose between a generalist and a specialist, and seeing the wrong provider can delay and compromise their care. Using a webchat tool powered by AI but overseen by humans can help businesses offer minimal online consultations, guide patients to the right provider, and provide insurance-related information. 

This allows patients to avoid a series of wrong and unproductive appointments and get to the source quickly, improving the overall quality of the process. 

“With Birdeye Webchat, Quick Care Med reduced phone call volumes, streamlined appointment scheduling, and handled medication refill requests. This significantly improved patient engagement. “ 

Read the entire case study to know the impact of Birdeye Webchat here! 

Patient history collection 

When patients arrive at a doctor’s waiting room, they often face a mountain of essential paperwork before they can be treated. You can simplify this process by allowing patients to submit these forms digitally through a webchat solution. This solution can also help answer any questions about the forms, collect patient history, and provide information on what to expect during their visit to your clinic. 

How to choose the best healthcare webchat solution

Healthcare businesses have unique needs and challenges in patient care automation, including HIPAA compliance, doctor preferences, payment requirements, and insurance considerations. 

That’s why it’s crucial to choose the right provider for your healthcare business needs. 

Here are a few key factors to consider while choosing a healthcare webchat service: 

• Data security and encryption
• The option for human intervention, if necessary 
• Automated solutions and workflows 
• Contact forms 
• Omnichannel communication management 
• Conversation analytics 

Let us explore these in detail. 

Data security and encryption

Every service, especially any communication your office makes about or with a patient, must be secure, safe, and encrypted to meet HIPAA requirements. Therefore, the webchat service your business uses must also be HIPAA-compliant. 

But what does HIPAA compliance mean in webchat solutions? 

HIPAA-compliant web chat solutions ensure privacy for all patient data via encryption and safe storage policies. You must also be able to install access restrictions and share only essential information with your administrative team members. 

The option for human intervention, if necessary 

There is a lot of scope and potential for AI in healthcare, especially in patient interaction and management. However, it’s crucial to choose a tool that allows for human intervention when needed. Your webchat solution should enable patients to connect with a human agent when AI responses fall short.

Also, AI medical chatbots may not always be entirely accurate and need human oversight for them to be fully functional and efficient. 

Automated workflows 

As a large clinic, your team likely understands the common queries, processes, and interventions patients need at every stage. You can transform this knowledge into automated procedures and workflows for the webchat to handle.

For example, businesses can automate a typical appointment booking/cancellation process so that the team can instead devote time to more complicated tasks. 

Contact forms 

To utilize the webchat service as an efficient lead generation tool, it is important to integrate HIPAA-compliant contact forms within the tool. This way, patients can submit personal information, chat with an agent, call the clinic, or even navigate to the physical address without leaving your website.

Omnichannel communication management 

While webchat is essential, it’s just one of many ways patients can reach you. The world is moving towards omnichannel messaging, where patients also connect via phone, social media, or text messaging services. To provide a consistent and comprehensive experience, webchat should be part of an integrated omnichannel communication model.

Conversation analytics 

Customer communication is often a treasure trove of pertinent information that can identify potential service issues, customer requirements, customer satisfaction scores, and so on. The webchat solution must allow businesses to measure the success rate of each conversation, track conversions, and collect feedback at every stage.

5 top healthcare webchat tools to consider for your business

The healthcare webchat market offers a variety of options to suit your business needs. Here are a few tools worth exploring:

1. Birdeye Webchat 
2. MedChat
3. OhMD 
4. Nextiva
5. Pabau 

Let’s explore these briefly. 

Birdeye Webchat

Birdeye Webchat is the leading webchat solution for multi-location businesses looking to scale their practice and revamp their patient communication. With Birdeye, you can: 

• Set up HIPAA-compliant workflows and automate chat flows 
• Use AI to set up answers for frequently asked questions, answer patient queries with the option for human oversight, and generate patient conversation summaries 
• Streamline patient communication management with Smart Inbox features that help you view SMS, social media messages, and other patient conversations in one view
• Integrate webforms to enable lead generation
• Book appointments and set up virtual assistants to improve patient onboarding 
• Enhance patient communication by attaching images and videos in live chat 
• Evaluate the impact of webchat on your business by tracking conversation volumes, close rates, and so on

MedChat

MedChat helps doctors, clinics, and other healthcare businesses automate patient communication. With this tool, businesses can:

• Automate commonly used workflows 
• Streamline appointment scheduling 
• Improve the efficiency of employees with AI assistance 
• Understand and analyze webchat performance 

MedChat is a HIPAA-compliant platform that assures the security and privacy of patient data across all connected channels. 

OhMD

OhMD is primarily a teleconsultation service but also serves as a convenient webchat tool for most healthcare businesses. With this tool, businesses can use the webchat feature to:

• book appointments 
• set up online consultations via video chat
• automate common patient requests 
• Communicate to patients via text messages 
• Collect patient history with intake forms 

Nextiva

Nextiva is a VoIP service provider that also offers a HIPAA-compliant tool for healthcare businesses to install and use a live chat solution on their website. With this tool, clinics and doctors can 

• Make/receive calls over the internet 
• Chat with patients or employees via webchat and text message
• Monitor patient communications from a unified dashboard
• Gain insights on patient experience with call analytics 

Pabau 

A cloud-based management tool, Pabau helps healthcare businesses improve the efficacy of their everyday operations and patient communication. Functionalities of the tool include:

• Appointment scheduling and reminders
• Intake form collection
• Payment collection
• Online consultations
• Patient information management in compliance with HIPAA norms

The tool also allows businesses to gain insights from chat performance to improve business performance and patient experience. 

Choose the right webchat solution for your healthcare practice 

Healthcare businesses must invest in the appropriate webchat tool to ensure they can improve patient experience, generate a higher volume of leads, and increase the conversion rates. It is also important that the business sets a strong strategy which includes setting the right goals, identifying the right functions required, and choosing the right tool according to the needs. 

Ensure that you also set up training sessions for your team on the new communication process, optimize webchat widget placement, and automate workflows for best results. 

Frequently asked questions on healthcare webchat 

Grow your healthcare enterprise with Birdeye 

As the leading customer experience management platform, Birdeye tools help growing multi-location businesses streamline their processes and strengthen their brand in the industry. 

HIPAA-compliant Birdeye solutions like Webchat, Appointments, Payments, and Social help healthcare businesses streamline operations and improve the overall patient experience. 

We strive to help the best healthcare businesses deliver a superior experience to their patients with minimal effort and resources. Our tools use the best AI technologies and automation principles that help you do the most for your patients without any strain on the resources. 

Understand how Birdeye can help you transform patient experience and engagement with our free demo now!