Your medical call center is only as reliable as the technology behind it. This is a critical issue if you expect your call center to unfailingly take your calls 24/7. Here’s why.
Many call centers install their systems on-site, at their main location. Though this may be convenient for them, it also represents a single point of failure. If something happens to the system in their office, that renders them unable to answer your calls. To combat this, the best call centers have their critical systems served from a remote, secure data center. These data centers are a best practice for call centers that take reliability and continuous operations seriously.
There are three key points to get the best out of these high-tech data centers.
Offsite Data Centers
The first key, which is a given, is that the data center must be off-site. Being remotely located isolates equipment and information in the data center from anything that happens at one of the call center sites. This eliminates the possibility that events at one call center facility could take down the entire multi-location call center network.
Yet with premise-based systems, a failure at that call center will take down the entire network. For that reason, having an off-site data center is the first step to ensuring 24/7 reliability and availability.
Data centers can have multiple levels of sophistication, with each tier providing significantly more protection, reliability, and stability. Tier 4 data centers offer an enterprise class of technical redundancy and superiority. An even higher standard is now emerging with tier 5 data centers. This surpasses the high standards of tier 4, providing uninterrupted computing power and service to its clients in the unlikely event of rare and extreme scenarios. To achieve the continuous, uninterrupted service you expect, it’s essential that your medical call center deploys their equipment in a tier 4 or 5 data center.
Located in Areas with Low Susceptibility to Natural Disasters
Though data centers can be located anywhere, the best ones are strategically situated in areas that have a low susceptibility and history of encountering natural disasters. Hurricanes and earthquakes are key threats to data center stability. Other dangers include flooding, landslides, and forest fires. For this reason, leading medical call centers select strategically-located data centers to minimize the threat from national disasters.
Redundant Data Centers
Having a strategically located data center with built-in redundancy is a giant step forward. However, to further maximize call center reliability, the best-in-class solution is to have two data centers, with each one serving as a backup to the other. In this way, even if a highly unlikely disaster occurs that affects one data center, the other one carries the load. Just make sure the data centers have a geographic separation of several hundred miles.
Summary
If it’s critical for you to have all your healthcare calls answered by your medical call center, don’t go with the least-cost provider. The reason they charge less is because they invest less in their infrastructure.
Before committing to a call center to handle your healthcare calls, investigate the technology behind them. Make sure your call center’s technology securely resides in a tier 4 or tier 5 data center, is strategically located, and has a remotely located backup data center.
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.
