It’s that time of year when many people’s thoughts turned to spring cleaning, that time to wash away the grime of winter and prepare for a new season of life. Many view this as an opportunity to throw away what is old and worn to make room for what is new and fresh.
Though your medical answering service may go through this type of spring cleaning, there’s another consideration that’s even more important. That’s doing a spring cleaning of the information your answering service uses to serve your patients.
Over time you’ve given your answering service instructions that goes into the database they have for your account. This repository can become cluttered, making it harder for them to best work for you. It’s also a prime spot for obsolete information to reside, all because someone forgot to tell your answering service about the changes that occurred in your medical practice or facility.
Contact them to review this critical information that they use on your behalf. They may be able to send you a printout, give you remote access to view the information, or review it with you over the phone. It matters not how this happens, only that it does.
Verify Essential Information
As you review the information your answering service has about your account, start by going over and spring cleaning each essential piece of support information. Has the name of your practice or organization changed? Have you moved, opened another location, or closed a remote site?
Double check that the contact information you gave them when you first began service is still correct. This includes your main phone number, unlisted numbers, email addresses, and website. Often these things change, but no one remembers to update your answering service. This means they’re doing their best to serve you but doing so with old information.
Update Employee Lists
Your medical answering service has a directory of all your employees or at least the ones that relate to patient care and communication. Keeping this information up to date is a challenge for even the most organized healthcare providers, so don’t become discouraged if you missed updating them a time or two and they don’t have a current list. While you’re at it review each employee’s contact information. Correct any deficiency.
Review On-Call Procedure
Last, it’s a smart spring-cleaning move to review the on-call protocol your medical answering service uses to reach your staff. Healthcare providers continually tweak their on-call processes to balance the needs of patients with the workload of medical staff.
Alternately, your practice’s on-call procedure may have ballooned over time into a complex series of cross connected and at times conflicting expectations that are challenging to understand and even harder to follow. Look at streamlining your on-call practices to make sure everyone knows what to do and can consistently follow it.
Summary
We live in an age of information overload. While your dedicated answering service team does its utmost to organize and manage the content you provide them, without periodic reviews this data can become unwieldy and problematic. That’s why it’s critical to do some informational spring cleaning.
Do yourself and your medical answering service a favor by conducting a thorough account review and making sure they have the correct information. This will allow them to serve your organization and your patients in the best way possible.
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.