When most people think of medical answering services, their mind jumps to after-hours coverage. They think about taking messages for routine calls and dispatching urgent ones to on-call staff.
While this is a correct understanding, it’s also short of the complete picture of what medical answering services can accomplish for their clients. Not only do they provide afterhours solutions, but they also offer phone-answering services for coverage during office hours.
Here are some thoughts to consider about medical answering services and daytime phone coverage:
Provide Relief for Office Staff: You know as well as anyone that changes in healthcare is pushing everyone in the industry to accomplish more, do it better, and do it for less. This puts obvious pressure on healthcare practitioners, but this intense focus also trickles down to their entire staff. Although your answering service can’t help you with what happens in your office, they can definitely help you better handle communications coming into your office.
Just as they do for you after office hours, your answering service can provide information to callers, take messages when appropriate, and escalate urgent calls about patients’ health emergencies for a quick response. In addition, advanced answering services can access your internet-ready appointment program and schedule appointments, take cancellations, and even seek to fill open slots.
You can tap your answering service to handle your phone calls during office hours. This could be when your staff gets extra busy, when you’re short staffed due to illnesses or vacations, and during staff meetings, office parties, and lunch breaks.
After-Hours Coverage Is Already Provided: If you already have an answering service to take your calls in the evenings and weekends, it’s a simple thing to expand coverage to include daytime hours. Your answering service already knows your office information and essential protocols. You merely need to review it to see if there’s any additional issues that might come up during business hours that they need to know.
This can usually be handled via phone call. Though they can often begin taking your daytime calls immediately, it’s best to plan for this by providing them the required information before the need comes up. However, your answering service desires to help you however they can, so they will do whatever possible to meet your needs as quickly as possible.
Ready to Expand Coverage When Needed: What if you don’t presently have an answering service and want to explore daytime coverage? That’s not a problem. Although medical answering services mostly handle afterhours coverage, they do provide daytime service for clients who need it. If that includes you, they’ll be happy to help.
As a benefit, once you use their daytime service, it’s a simple matter to add afterhours coverage if you need to. Again, they have your information and protocols already programmed in your account. They merely need to add any special instructions for situations that could arise after office hours that wouldn’t come up during the daytime.
Today’s best answering services for the healthcare industry can do all these things and more. If it involves communication between your office and your patients, your medical answering service can most likely help you do it faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost.
Learn how medical answering service from MedConnectUSA can help your clinic or practice, and get a free quote to discover how affordable their healthcare communication services are. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer and call center authority.
