You give countless hours to your patients during the week, but your work doesn’t stop when your doors closed. After business hours and during the weekends, your patients call you for medical emergencies and questions. You take a call when you can and the rest go to your voicemail. Those patients have to wait until a staff member can provide any response.
While taking a call it is difficult to weed out the urgent ones. For every call that you answer, there is another potentially urgent call on hold, wasting precious minutes.
You want to offer your time and personal touch to all your patients, but sometimes its too much for you and your staff to handle.
Fortunately, you no longer have to choose which call to answer. By hiring an outsourced medical answering services, you can manage your calls and offer call options that are made specifically to your medical practice. Also, your patients can get the help they need, when they need it, without waiting for several minutes.
Here are some benefits that you enjoy when you opt for medical answering services:
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Save Money
Time is money and every minute your staff spends on answering the call that could have used to do more important tasks. Yes, you can hire more staff to ease the strain of calls, but this would cost you way more than answering service. When hiring these services, you have access to many cost-saving options, such as:
- After-hours calls: They can offer 24/7 service while you pay for the time spent talking and making calls, not the idle time.
- One point of contact: Rather than hiring a person to attend calls, the answering service can serve as the sole point of contact.
- Reduced employee costs: By opting for answering services, you can hire staff for important jobs. This will help you by saving money on salaries, insurance, and paid leaves.
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Protect Doctor’s Privacy and Personal Time
Doctors usually spend more time than there actual working hours. For them, after-hours is time to relax and spend with family. Unfortunately, no one can control the timing of a medical emergency, which means the doctor has to handle these problems even during their time off. But with answering services, your patients can speak to a trained health professional at any time of the day. These operators will evaluate whether the call is urgent or not. If yes, they will forward the call, otherwise, they will take the message for the next day.
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Decrease Hold Time
Just like you, your patients also have a busy life. As much as you’d like to answer the call immediately, your patients are often put on hold. With an answering service, your patients call will be redirected to a call center instead of placing them on hold. This service allows you to address your patient’s need in a reasonable time, which increases their satisfaction.
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Meet HIPAA Requirements
According to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, all patients’ health information should be guarded. If your answering service violets any of the HIPPA requirements, you are responsible for the breach of your patient’s privacy. Avoid these violations by hiring a service provider who meets all the HIPPA requirements.
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Meet Medicare/Government Requirements
When conducting medical outbound education and verification call, the government requires strict adherence to its guidelines. Unfortunately, setting up a system to handle these is expensive and time-consuming, using a medical answering service, you can use an OEV call center provide to cut the cost, and meet all the requirements at the same time.
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Keep Irrefutable Records
When dealing with sensitive information as medical records, it is important to keep your practice safe. All the calls made through outsourced answering service are recorded and time-stamped, which provides an accurate and irrefutable record.
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Increase Efficiency
By hiring answering service to handle your calls, your staff has more time to do much more important tasks. Every minute saved by your call center can be used more productively, which increases efficiency. Your patients can reach medical help whenever they want. You can give your patients the attention they need.
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Increase Patient Satisfaction
All these benefits will create a more satisfying experience for your patients. More efficient operations will help your decrease the time your patients spend waiting during a phone call. Your patients can reach you at any time of the day, which increases patient satisfaction and can lead to more references.
Everyone deserves time to relax and recover from a day of hard work, even the doctors. If you are a doctor and you are not able to give time to your patients, then try using medical answering services.
