Medical telephone answering services answer phone calls from your patients, take their messages, and process those messages according to your specifications. This is simple enough and straightforward. But what if you need a company that will do more than just take messages? What if you need more than a medical answering service?
A Medical Call Center
A medical call center is more than an answering service. Yes, a full-service, professional medical call center can provide quality answering service to the healthcare community, but they can do much more. They can handle sophisticated healthcare communication requirements and situations. And they can do this with precision and excellence. Consider what a call center that specializes in the healthcare industry can do for you and your organization.
HIPAA Compliant
Let’s start with HIPAA compliance. Professional healthcare-focused call centers take all the necessary steps to comply with HIPAA regulations. This protects you and protects your patients. The best medical call centers, however, go beyond the legal requirements of HIPAA to provide best-practice excellence in meeting and exceeding HIPAA mandates. When they do this, everyone wins.
Secure Communications
Leading medical answering services provide secure messaging service when relaying protected health information to your doctors and medical staff. It’s expected, and its required. Professional medical call centers can extend this concept to provide secure, HIPAA-compliant communications to protect all your callers’ information when you transmit it to them, but not all centers do. Make sure your medical call center does. You’ll be glad you checked.
Disaster Preparedness and Recovery
No one likes to consider the impact that a natural or manmade disaster could have on their organization and their ability to provide needed healthcare services at a time when they’re most critical. We hope that disasters won’t occur, but if they do, we need to have a plan to provide uninterrupted communication channels with patients and callers.
This is where a professional medical call center comes in. They can serve as your backup communication provider if something occurs that prevents you from communicating with patients. The best news is that a seamless transition can occur so that your patients aren’t even aware of a communications problem.
Scripted Call Processing
Some medical communications require precise wording to minimize confusion or to provide a standardized response to each caller, every time. Whether it’s for legal or medical reasons, professional medical call centers can provide these call scripts to their staff when they process your calls. The result is a consistent response on every call.
Conclusion
If your practice, clinic, or healthcare facility needs an answering service, be sure to go with a professional medical answering service. However, if you need more than an answering service, don’t despair. Go with a professional medical call center. They’ll be able to provide you with everything your answering service did and much more.
Learn how medical call center services 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.