Your medical answering service is available to help you better serve your patients and callers 24/7. They are your customer-facing resource when you’re not in the office or aren’t able to answer your phone. This is the primary function of an answering service.
However, your answering service’s purpose isn’t just to serve your patients, they exist to serve you too. This means they want to do whatever they can to save you time and money. One way leading medical answering services do this is by providing a client portal for you to use.
A client portal is a tool to share information between an answering service and its clients. To maximize its utility, the portal must be secure, easy to use, and available 24/7. You can always contact your answering service directly by phone to accomplish the same things you can do on a portal, but the portal is faster and more convenient in most cases.
Here are some things you can do with your answering service’s client portal:
Use a Client Portal to Manage Your On-Call
Managing your on-call schedule is a hassle. There’s no way around it. First you must develop the schedule, and then you must let your answering service know what it is. Of course, on-call schedules change—frequently. This often means making adjustments on the fly to accommodate the needs of your on-call staff. Then you need to let your answering service know as soon as possible.
Some medical practices develop and manage their on-call schedule on paper or a spreadsheet. Then they fax the information to the answering service. Their answering service needs to receive the information and then enter it into their system for their staff to access. This takes time, and often time isn’t a luxury you have when making an urgent, last-minute adjustment to your on-call schedule. In addition, each step is a potential source for errors to occur on both sides.
However, instead of a manual, cumbersome process of managing your on-call schedules, you can use your medical answering service’s client portal to do the same thing easier and faster. Simply use their tool to develop your on-call schedule. As soon as you perfect it and click save, it’s immediately available to every agent at your medical answering service. What used to take several minutes—in an ideal situation—is reduced to a fraction of a second when using an on-call portal.
And what if you need to change your on-call schedule? Just log into the secure client portal and make the changes. Click save, and you’re done. It’s that simple.
Use a Client Portal to Access Messages
A key function of your answering service is to document the calls they handle for you. This includes emergencies and routine calls. They also note the disposition and what they did to process those calls. What if you need to check on the details of a specific call? What if you want a summary of all the calls they handled in the last twenty-four hours?
Just login to their secure online client portal, and tell it what you’re looking for. It will quickly access the information you want, along with the necessary details, and provide it to you. You can view it or download it in the format you prefer.
No longer do you need to call your answering service and have them retrieve this information for you. You can do it yourself fast and easy. Of course, your answering service staff is always there if you need them or have a unique situation that the portal doesn’t cover, but the client portal is usually the place to begin.
Summary
You can use your answering service’s client portal to manage, change, and share your on-call schedule. You can also use your answering service’s portal to access your messages, obtain additional information, and review related data.
Your answering service’s client portal is one more resource they offer to serve you better and enhance the value of the services they provide to you and your patients. Don’t overlook this key resource, and don’t go with an answering service that doesn’t provide it.
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.
