Within a medical office, an answering service can be an extension of your practice, providing greater accessibility for patients when they need you the most. If you’re not too familiar with how a medical answering service works—and how it can elevate your quality of care—you’ve come to the right place.
Answering Service Care provides 24/7/365 answering services for a wide range of specialized industries, including medical offices. This blog will answer a few of the most common questions we hear about the types of services we can provide, and how they can positively impact your practice.
What Does an Answering Service Do?
An answering service—medical or otherwise—primarily does just what its name suggests: answers inbound calls. Whether patients have basic questions, need to schedule (or reschedule an appointment), or have something else on their mind, a medical answering service like Answering Service Care handles medical office calls promptly and professionally.
Since answering service companies act as representatives of your business, make sure you work with a high-quality service provider. Not all answering services are of equal quality, so working with one that provides highly-specialized, trained professionals is of high importance.
What Is the Purpose of an Answering Service for a Doctor’s Office?
As described above, the purpose of an answering service for a medical office is to help connect patients with the insights and care they need to manage their health. Here’s a general example of how an after hours HIPAA-compliant answering service works:
- Before the answering service goes live, we’ll work with you to help develop customized call flows tailored to your services and clientele.
- Once the service is live, your office simply needs to forward its inbound calls to the number provided by the answering service.
- When patients call your office, their calls will go to the answering service. The live agent will greet the patient, collect their information, and answer their questions. They may also schedule or reschedule appointments.
- The agent will take the appropriate next actions on the patient’s behalf, and document the call’s purpose, resolution, and other important notes to keep your staff in the loop.
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How Does an Answering Service Work After Hours?
Since medical emergencies don’t just occur during normal business hours, it’s important to find a medical answering service with 24/7/365 availability—like Answering Service Care. That way, whether a patient calls at 2:00 p.m. or 2:00 a.m., they can receive the same level of attention and care—especially with urgent matters.
Depending on how you would like after-hours calls to be handled, we’ll work with you to develop scripts and workflows tailored to your patients’ needs and your practice’s preferences.
In addition to answering calls 24/7, an after hours answering service should also provide functions such as:
- Appointment scheduling, confirmation, and cancellation
- Automated appointment reminders
- Call recording
- HIPAA compliance
- Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
- Secure messaging
How Much Does an After Hours Answering Service Cost?
Probably less than you expect! If you were to recruit, hire, and train even a single medical receptionist, it would cost, on average, around $40,000. While there are certain benefits to working with an in-person, in-house receptionist, it can be difficult to justify the cost—especially when you consider the fact that they’ll likely only provide coverage in 8 hour shifts (during business hours).
By contrast, when you work with Answering Service Care, you can offer around-the-clock coverage for a fraction of the cost. In comparison with the $40,000 salary noted above, our services range from $25 to $599 a month (at the time of this article’s publication). Even the $599/month price point for enterprise businesses offers significant savings, as it amounts to less than $7,500 for 12 months of continuous, professional coverage.
Want to learn more about our full range of services? Visit our medical answering service pricing page for the current packages and prices.
What Is the Best Medical Answering Service for After-Hours?
When compared with an in-house receptionist, Answering Service Care provides a wide range of professional services your practice can leverage anytime, day or night—including weekends and holidays. And with no long-term contracts, same day setup, and a 21-day money back guarantee, you can rest easy knowing that you won’t be locked into any burdensome, long-term contracts. That being said, we’re confident that it won’t take long to convince you that working with Answering Service Care is the right move for your practice! Get started today.
