Your medical office is definitely in need of a helping hand when it comes to the telephone.
It rings non-stop, interrupting patient care and generally creating chaos. An answering service is an ideal solution, but how do you go about finding the best medical response answering service for your dollar? Medical response answering services that will complement your medical office share a few common elements, read on to learn more.
Characteristics of a Top Notch Medical Response Answering Service
Your medical response answering service should be as dedicated to your patients as you are, no matter what’s going on.
They’re meant to be an extension of your office, not a distinct and different organization. A medical response answering service that has a distinguished history of excellence in the medical field will help your patients feel more secure by providing a way to reach a friendly, human operator any time of the day or night, as well as elements like:
- HIPAA Compliance Training. Each and every member of a medical response answering service team has to be trained in the latest HIPAA rules and regulations, and updated as the rules change. This is a big thing. By partnering with an answering service, you’re taking on a risk that they may mishandle health information, which can lead to an up to $50,000 fine to you, even if you didn’t know they were doing it.The best medical response answering service teams can show you their training records and prove their commitment to remaining compliant.
- Emergency Call Handling. No matter what time your patients call, a great answering service team can help them in an emergency. First, they’ll evaluate the situation to determine if it is a real emergency or if the caller is just really in need of reassurance.Then they’ll swiftly send a message to the on-call person, contact emergency services, patch the caller through to a designated authority or take a message to be returned in the morning, depending on the seriousness of the situation at hand. Medical response answering service professionals are cool under pressure and can help calm worried minds.
- Appointment Scheduling. Scheduling appointments eats up a lot of your day, and it unnecessarily ties up your in-house staff. That’s why a dedicated call queue for appointment scheduling is such a necessity for medical facilities. Patients can make, change or cancel appointments at their leisure, even after hours, with a medical response answering service.Because their software will interface with what you’re already using, it’s easy to see any updates to the schedule in real time, virtually eliminating double-bookings if you choose to continue to schedule your own appointments with patients in the office. It’s a little thing that can do a lot to improve patient care quality.
You’ll know it when you find a great medical response answering service that’s a good fit for your office. The best in the business have lots of experience, love their customers, focus on improving their processes every single day and invest heavily in keeping their team up to date with the latest training on issues like patient health information privacy to ensure that you remain in compliance.
