Use Your Medical Answering Service to Increase Effectiveness, Productivity, and Patient Satisfaction
As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, a medical telephone answering service can help provide critical communication to better serve patients and reduce costs. Here are some of the things medical answering services can do to help your practice, clinic, urgent care facility, hospital, or medical center.
24/7 Phone Coverage
Medical telephone answering services excel at providing around-the-clock phone coverage for the healthcare community. They’ve been doing this for decades, and the leading services do this with excellence. They answer your calls anytime of the day or night. They can give out information to callers, take messages for routine issues, and handle urgent calls according to your protocol.
Dispatch Afterhours Emergencies
When an urgent call comes in after office hours, your medical telephone answering service can handle this as your instructions dictate. It may be to direct them to the emergency room or urgent care facility. Alternately you may prefer for your on-call staff to interact with these patients directly. Whatever your preference, your answering service can accommodate your requests in handling these emergencies with care and professionalism, fast and efficiently.
Take Messages
For most phone calls, your medical telephone answering service will take a message. They’ll request the information you need from your patients and provide it to you in an easy-to-read format. Then they’ll send you these messages according to your instructions. This could be as they come in or batched for later access, such as when you begin work each day.
Set Appointments
Leading medical telephone answering services can also set appointments for your patients and manage your calendar. They can remotely access your internet-ready scheduling program to see exactly what’s available and fill open slots.
Confirm Appointments
Having a full schedule is critical in the healthcare industry, but reducing no-shows is even more important. Your medical telephone answering service can help by reminding patients of their appointments. This can be by telephone, email, or text. They can even do a combination of all three, whatever you wish. The result is more kept appointments, higher provider utilization, and greater billable work.
Office Hour Calls
Not only do medical answering services handle your calls after hours and on weekends, they can also cover you during office hours. Whether you’re short staffed, extra busy, or need to cover breaks, lunches, and meetings, your answering service is your solution for continuous, uninterrupted phone assistance.
Address Callers and Patients Professionally
In all this, your medical telephone answering service will handle your calls with a professionalism that will make you proud. Your patients will be treated right and their concerns addressed according to your instructions.
A medical telephone answering service can play a key role in increasing your efficiency and effectiveness, decreasing costs, and boosting patient satisfaction, as well as keeping your schedule full.
Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer from Southwest Michigan.