What Can a Medical Answering Service Do For You?
Jul
30
If you are a doctor and are concerned about downsizing in the near future (or at least resisting the urge to hire more employees) then consider a much less expensive but still very effective move: hire a medical answering service! What can such a service do for you? A medical answering service can provide secretarial assistance to your office via telecommuting technology.
That means that whenever your office is closed on the weekend or weeknights, patients can still get a hold of you and leave messages. They will not be talking to a machine but to a human voice, a flesh and blood operator who lives somewhere in the United States. (As opposed to Mumbai) Your patients will be much more receptive to leaving a message with a human representative than a machine. Our paranoia runs deep when it comes to answering machines. Patients in a crisis might hate the idea of a doctor missing a message due to a machine malfunction, or because he was never able to hear the machine playback.
When a patient leaves a message with a medical answering service, he or she is confident that someone knows about the message and that the doctor has read it. After all, a medical answering service is capable of screening calls for a doctor instantaneously—even when separated by thousands of miles of U.S. soil. After getting a priority message, the receptionist will send the message to the doctor via email, voice mail, text message or pager. That eliminates the waiting time and accelerates the communication process.
Operators for a medical answering service are trained to handle a call from beginning to end, eliminating the chance for an error to occur. Some companies even use automated systems that stop hold time before it gets excessive. Other companies let doctors or their secretaries record personalized messages that will play during the wait. The best companies even place limits as to how many clients a single operator can handle. This results in less holding times, and naturally, less frustrated callers.
Remember that if you want to reach out to new patients, or at least keep the status quo, you have to start communicating with these individuals. Your secretary may be a pro at this, but if she is unavailable to work past a certain time or on weekends, then your practice could be suffering. Let a medical answering service help you excel!
