Some answering services only handle healthcare related accounts, and other answering services refuse to even consider medical clients, but most answering services are happy to take on any kind of account, rather it’s a good fit or not.
While this distinction may not seem important to you as a medical practitioner or healthcare organization, it’s of critical significance. Your answering service, as a patient-facing company, directly interacts with your patients. Your answering service can greatly impact your present workload and future business opportunities. For this reason it’s essential to select an answering service that specializes in healthcare. You want a medical answering service.
Here are the reasons why you should select an answering service that specializes in healthcare, instead of a generic provider that tries to be all things to all people.
Focus Leads to Excellence
Medical answering services handle only accounts that relate to healthcare. This laser focus allows them to concentrate on one industry and to master it. The result is a high degree of healthcare excellence that few general-purpose answering services can match.
Familiarity Increases Skill
At an all-purpose answering service, the staff attempts to handle a wide variety of accounts from every conceivable industry. They might go from taking a call for a doctors office to answering for a plumber, followed by an engineering firm and then a manufacturer. Add to the mix a garbage company, a funeral home, and a property management company. Do you want the same person trying to answer healthcare calls for you? Not likely.
Repetition Yields Proficiency
When an answering service staff only handles healthcare related calls, they become adept in dealing with medical terminology, industry jargon, and common patient and caller expectations. These key traits remain consistent across their entire client base and easily transfer from one client to the next. Since every call is healthcare related, this repetition produces a high degree of proficiency among the staff, which can’t be matched by a generic answering service who tries to handle accounts from every industry.
Aptitude Produces Competence
Though medical answering services do not require all their employees to have a background in healthcare, many people with a knowledge of healthcare do gravitate towards medical answering service work. Plus, medical answering services look to hire people with more education and a proven ability to learn. This provides an added layer of aptitude that produces highly competent employees.
Experience Results in Quality
A final major benefit in using a medical answering service is their vast years of experience working in the healthcare industry. They have proven themselves over time, along the way building up a huge amount of practical knowhow when it comes to healthcare communication. The result is the ability to provide a quality service to the healthcare industry.
In the medical profession we have generalists, and we have specialists. Sometimes we want a generalist and other times we require a specialist. We select the one that’s the best match for a particular situation.
When it comes to selecting an answering service, however, we should never go with a generalist that knows a little bit about all industries. Instead the wise choice is to select a specialist that has amassed years of experience, knowledge, and proficiency in serving the healthcare industry.
Learn how medical answering service from MedConnectUSA can help your clinic or practice and get a free quote to find out just how affordable their critical communication services are. Peter Lyle DeHaan is a freelance writer and call center authority.