In providing appropriate accessibility for your patients 24/7, there’s a balance to pursue between a healthy workload for the provider and a fitting responsiveness to patients. A smart move to wisely manage these often-conflicting goals is to tap the services of a full-featured medical answering service.
A healthcare answering service can answer your patients’ calls around-the-clock. They are available to serve your callers whenever you need them to. Not only is this outside of regular business hours, but they can also help during the workday such as lunches, staff meanings, or even breaks.
Your essential medical answering service plays a critical role in providing the healthcare support and the availability that your patients seek. It’s good to consider this decision to achieve the optimum results.
The Provider Perspective
You, as the healthcare provider, have a commitment to meet the healthcare needs of your patients. This includes being available for them when they need you now and ensuring that your practice is viable to be available for them in the future.
You, as a person, also have a commitment to yourself, maintaining good physical and mental health to benefit you and your family when you’re not working and your patients when you are. Having a healthy work-life balance is key. Yet the demands of the healthcare industry continually conspire to thwart this essential goal.
For this reason, you’ve hired a medical answering service. They can represent you and your practice to your patients outside of normal office hours, addressing routine questions, holding non-urgent messages for your staff, and contacting an on-call person for emergencies.
When they must call you, don’t view it as an irritation but as a reminder of all the many times they save you from getting a call. Their service is invaluable.
The Patient Perspective
Although you have the health concerns of hundreds of patients to keep in mind, your patients’ outlook is far narrower. They’re concerned about just their own health. Or only about their family’s needs. When their concerns drive them to make a phone call, they have expectations. Though they don’t assume you will personally answer every call around-the-clock, they do want to talk to a person—not a computer or a machine—when they call.
This is where your medical answering service steps in. They are an empathetic listener, striving to offer assurance, assistance, and answers whenever possible. Their goal is to balance the needs of you—their client—with the needs of your callers, which represent your livelihood and future.
The Wise Conclusion
Given this essential, all-critical role that your healthcare answering service plays, don’t be penny wise and dollar foolish. Your answering service is not a cost to contain but a valuable partner in your goal to meet the healthcare needs of your patients and grow your practice.
Though your patients’ after-hours contacts may seem like just a phone call to you, to them it’s much more. It represents their health and their well-being. Keep that in mind.
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.