If you take your medical practice seriously, you should take your answering service seriously too. Though some in the healthcare industry dismiss their answering service as unimportant, the wise practitioners view their answering service as an integral part of their practice or clinic.
Why is that? Because your answering service is your primary contact for your patients and prospective patients when you’re not in the office. In any given week, you and your staff are in the office about 25 percent of the time, but your answering service is representing you the other 75 percent.
But if you want the best results, not any answering service will do. The smart move is to go with a medical answering service. They best comprehend the healthcare industry, understand how to treat your patients, and know how to make you shine. These are all hallmarks of success.
When you hire a professional medical answering service, here are some of the outcomes you can expect:
Better Keep Existing Patients
Patient retention is key. Each patient represents a lifetime of medical needs, along with the revenue that accompanies those services. You don’t want to risk losing one of your valued patients over an unanswered phone or a bungled call when your office is closed.
A professional medical answering service will treat your patients with respect. Their staff receives ongoing training to know how to properly handle healthcare related calls. And when those calls are handled properly, your patients will never think of switching their allegiance and going someplace else.
Help Acquire New Patients
When someone calls their doctor’s office after business hours it’s because they have a concern that needs immediate attention. They don’t want to wait. But if they can’t reach their doctor by telephone, they’ll start calling other places hoping for the answers they seek. When they call your office and reach your professional medical answering service, they’ll quickly learn they called the right place. With your medical answering service as your professional after-hours representative, they’ll take care of this prospective patient and help you add them to your practice.
Increase Appointments
Another service your professional medical answering service can provide is to take appointments for you 24/7. They can schedule appointments, change appointments, and cancel appointments, which allows the open slot to be filled faster. Imagine leaving your office at night with holes in the schedule for the following day. That’s discouraging. Now imagine arriving the next day and finding your answering service has filled all those openings for you. It can happen.
Confirm Appointments
Missed appointments place a drag on your practice, both in terms of efficiency and in maximizing billable services. Your professional answering service can call your patients to confirm their upcoming appointments. They can also add email and text communications into the mix. And although you can buy technology to automate email and text messages, for phone confirmations—the most effective means of confirmation—you need a real person to do it. You need your medical answering service.
Conclusion
A generic answering service may claim to be able to do some of these things for you. But do they really understand the healthcare industry? Do they focus only on medical accounts? If the answer to either question is no, then they’re not the best ones to represent you. A professional medical answering service understands the healthcare industry, has mastered HIPAA regulations, and knows the right way to treat your patients.
Don’t leave your after-hours phone calls—and your practice—in just anyone’s hands. For the best results work with a professional medical answering service. Your patients will thank you and your profits will increase.
Learn how medical answering service from MedConnectUSA can help your practice, clinic, or facility. Then get a free quote to discover how affordable their healthcare communication services are. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer and call center authority.
