What is your attitude toward your medical answering service? Do you view them as a cost to control or as a critical part of serving your patients? Think about your answer. From a strict financial standpoint, keeping your costs—including your answering service—low maximizes profit. You need a profit if you want to endure as a viable organization and continue to serve your patients, so you look for the lowest cost answering service.
When it comes to your medical answering service, however, cost-containment ignores the critical role they play in helping you best meet the healthcare needs of your patients.
Cut Expenses with the Lowest Cost Answering Service
If you approach healthcare as a business vehicle to produce maximum profitability, then you may want to find the lowest cost answering service. Even better, skip the answering service altogether in route your after-hours calls into voicemail or even an answering machine.
You can justify this impersonal approach by assuming that the patient will either go to the ER or call back when your office is open. Never mind that an equally viable option is that they’ll call another healthcare provider and you just lost a patient.
Maybe seeking the lowest cost answering service isn’t the best pursuit to produce the most favorable long-term outcomes.
Invest in Your Practice with a Quality Medical Answering Service
An alternative to viewing your after-hours telephone solution from a cost reduction mindset is to view your essential medical answering service as an investment. By providing professional communication accessibility to your patients and callers 24/7, you invest in their healthcare outcomes and in your practice’s long-term viability.
Think about your interactions with the patient who first called after hours. Do you want to spend time listening to them gripe about their frustration with what happened or didn’t happen when they called? Or would you rather immediately move to address their healthcare concern?
Now multiply this many times throughout the month. Having the right medical answering service working for you around-the-clock will help make your interactions with your patients be more effective and efficient during the day.
Hiring the right medical answering service will impact how smoothly or frustrating each day goes. That’s why the smart move is to view your medical answering service as an investment in your practice’s future.
Consider the Difference
Which outcome do you prefer? Do you want to save a couple dollars a day going with a cheap answering service—or no answering service—and incur the wrath of frustrated patients who feel disrespected by what happened when they called the night before? Then go with the lowest cost answering service.
But wouldn’t you gladly pay a few dollars to avoid having that discussion and letting it interrupt the goal of both you and your patient to address their healthcare needs?
This all happens when you invest in the right medical answering service to handle your organization’s after-hours phone calls.
Learn how medical answering service from MedConnectUSA can help your practice, clinic, or facility better serve the healthcare needs of your patients. 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.