Patient Access Specialist I (Benedum Geriatric Center)

The Benedum Geriatric Center provides a comprehensive range of services focused on the care of older adults, including expert medical treatments, specialized psychiatric services, osteoporosis management, and compassionate palliative care. Our dedicated professionals are deeply committed to delivering exceptional geriatric care. As a full-time Patient Access Specialist I, you will assist in facilitating this commitment by scheduling appointments for our physicians, managing multiple locations and session times, and serving as the main point of contact for patient access coordination. Working closely with the Supervisor/Manager, you will help ensure that our goal of 72-hour access for patients is consistently met, contributing to the seamless delivery of care.

Responsibilities:

• Review, verify and enter the patient's demographic information to ensure data integrity.
• Schedule appointments according to the physician templates for similar types of physicians, generally at one office or multiple session timeshares (single specialty phone room or front desk environment).
• Schedule appointments according to the templates/departmental scripts while meeting business unit scheduling accuracy requirements.
• Obtain chief complaints in order to schedule appropriately.
• Take incoming calls demonstrating the essential skills documented in the Telephone Courtesy Standards.
• Understand UPMC 72-hour appointment requirement and work to ensure guidelines are met.
• Appropriately distribute/triage phone calls to other areas and/or clinical providers (billing, nurse, operations lead, etc.).
• Routinely attend department meetings and on-going in-service and training programs, to present and exchange pertinent information.
• Work the overflow call list and Audiocare report.
• Review and verify the patient's insurance information.
• Coordinate access to care for patients within own department or location.
• Monitor patient wait list report.
• Compile and send new patient packets or flags patient if needs to be completed upon arrival.
• Knowledgeable about various reasons for patient calls such as prescription refills, how to triage clinical issues, participating insurances, questions about physicians, etc.
• Take responsibility to escalate to appropriate clinical or supervisory personnel when needed, including thorough and accurate documentation of telephone encounter for messaging.
• Function at multiple sites as requested by supervisor.
• Answer multi-line telephone system (the number of calls taken must be within 90% of the daily average calls per day per agent).