When you think of a medical answering service, you probably imagine a company that answers calls on the evenings and weekends. They take messages and dispatch urgent calls to on-call staff. This is a correct understanding and is a common function of healthcare answering services.
However, a medical telephone answering service is for more than just after hours. They can also handle your daytime calls, too. Consider the following applications:
A Solution for Staffing Shortages
Finding good help is challenging in most any industry, but especially so in the healthcare field. Sometimes staffing shortages happen. When this occurs, many things suffer, including critical communication with your patients.
A daytime answering service that specializes in healthcare is an ideal resource to help you maintain a professional level of communication with your patients even if your office is short-staffed. Let your answering service take and screen all your calls. They can transfer time-sensitive callers to your office staff and take messages on nonurgent calls. The nonurgent calls can be sent by email, either as they arrive or in a group for your staff to handle at one time. When they can batch these calls, it frees them from the constant interruption of a ringing telephone.
A Reliable Answer When Your Staff Is Busy
Even when you are fully staffed, there are times when your staff becomes extra busy. This keeps them from being able to handle every issue when it comes up. One of these tasks is often telephone calls, which seem less urgent than the patients in your office who want to see a healthcare provider, the people who need to schedule their next appointment, and the folks waiting to pay their bill or provide insurance information.
During these busy times, let your incoming phone calls reroute to your daytime answering service. They’ll take detailed information from callers and provide it to you in the format you prefer, such as email, text, or voicemail. Then you can follow up when things slow down.
A Relief For Vacations and Sick Days
Absent staff presents another problem for effective communication. You can’t hire someone to come in and cover a two-week vacation, and it certainly isn’t practical to do so for a sick day. Work in your office must proceed as normal, as if everyone was there.
When you have daytime answering service already set up, they can take over for you anytime and at a moment’s notice. You usually won’t even need to schedule this in advance. Just route your calls to your answering service, and they’ll do the rest.
A Flexible Solution
Remember how we mentioned that most medical answering services handle calls in the evenings and weekends? Well, most daytime answering services can handle after hour’s work as well.
They already know you and your organization, they have their systems set up to serve you, and they know your preferences. At this point it’s a small matter to extend coverage to include evenings and weekends. This flexibility is hard to beat.
Medical answering services are available 24/7 to handle your patients communication needs. Sometimes this is after hours, and sometimes it’s during the business day. And if you need them to, they can cover both.
The key is having a relationship established with your medical answering service, and then they’ll be ready whenever you need them for whatever communication needs you may have.
Learn more about how daytime hours answering service from MedConnectUSA can help your clinic or practice and get a free quote to find out just how affordable their critical communication services are. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer and call center authority.
