Home health care agencies provide vital services for the patients in their care, but no home health care agency can do it alone.
The massive coordination required between doctors, nurses, caregivers, medical supply companies and schedulers at your agency plus a tight budget makes it difficult to always have enough of the right employees, especially the support personnel. Hiring a home health care agency answering service can help bridge the gap between the manpower you really need and the budget you actually have.
Home Health is a Team Effort
For a home health care agency, having a team of telephone professionals at your disposal can mean the difference between a high level of care and patients slipping through the cracks. You may not realize it, but there are a number of duties that an answering service can take over for a fraction of the cost of hiring a dedicated telephone operator.
Here are just a few examples of jobs that answering services can do for you:
- Overflow call answering. Even if you do your own telephone answering, there are times when you’re on another line or simply too busy to pick up the phone. Sure, callers have a chance to go to voicemail, but what if they needed something right away? What if they have a problem they don’t want to leave up to chance? Having an answering service take your call overflow means a human will always answer the phone, protecting your clients and employees all day.
- Emergency call forwarding. Ideally, you’d love for all your patients to have a smooth experience with home health, but there are times when they need more services than they’re getting or a true emergency strikes. These are the moments when your clients need you most and they simply can’t wait for tomorrow. Answering services can be manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week to catch each and every call so the true emergencies get the help they need right away.
- Appointment scheduling. In order to give each home health client the service they need, you’re probably setting lots of appointments for various employees throughout the day. Unfortunately, your staff is also doing other work like dispatching nurses to certain locations or helping coordinate patient care for temporary hospital stays. A dedicated appointment setting team doesn’t have any such distractions, they only make, change and cancel appointments. They let you feel secure in the knowledge that an appointment won’t be accidentally forgotten.
- Employee dispatching. Did you know that you can turn dispatching over to your home health care agency answering service? It’s true! Instead of hiring a dispatcher, you could have a whole team of them ready and waiting for your calls. This can be an invaluable tool for a small home health care agency that has to ask support staff to spread themselves too thin.
Sometimes, providing ideal care for your patients means partnering with specialized professionals like answering services. Since they charge for the times when they’re actually handling a call on your behalf, these companies are also budget-friendly and scale well as your service grows.
