What Does A Doctor's Answering Service Do?

A medical answering service is more than someone who takes phone calls when your office is closed. Yes, they’ll do that for you, but they can also do much more.

Office Hours Coverage Too

What’s their task during the office hours? You can also help with your medical answering service. Let your office staff access calls to your answering service during the day and this will free them up to focus on what's going on in your office, with the people sitting in your waiting and consultation rooms. By eliminating a ringing telephone's interruption and offloading it to your answering service, this will help the workers become more efficient and better care for patient needs.

Try using your answering service for coverage outside office hours. They will be able to answer your phone for breaks, lunches and holidays as well as to compensate for absences. The answering service is also useful when the office is extra busy for staff meetings or day or week time meetings. And, of course, by sending all of your office-hours calls to them you can know the most value from your answering service.

You may have some assumptions about what they do and how much they can support your medical practice, clinic, or hospital to better serve patients if you have never used a skilled answering service, or have not used one recently.

Besides taking messages from callers and giving them basic information, here's what the answering service of advanced doctors can do for you.

Appointment Scheduling and Reminders

When someone calls after hours and wants an appointment, it can be scheduled by your answering service and fill an open slot.

Answering service can also help you reduce no-shows, in addition to scheduling appointments. For appointments regularly scheduled months in advance, patients ' chances of not holding their appointment are a problem. Each missed appointment is a lost opportunity to serve patients, along with the associated billable services. Missed appointments result in inefficiencies and sales losses.

Your answering service can help minimize missed appointments by reminding patients of their commitments to increase their chances of appearing when they are supposed to. And if a patient wants to cancel, it is better to know when it is too late to fill it sooner than later.

You can reach patients by phone, email or text with your answering service. Often, the highest success rate comes from a combination of contact methods. We will, for example, call 3 days in advance, email twenty-four hours in advance, and send a text reminder an hour before. This will help greatly reduce the number of no-shows.

Nurse Triage Answering Service

The front office staff is not only bombarded with phone calls, nurses do so too. Though these calls frequently fulfill a patient-felt desire, they often disrupt the primary responsibility of the nurses to serve patients in your workplace, clinic, or hospital.

Were you aware that leading medical answering services can also help to address this? When these calls go to your response center, they can identify those who need a certified nurse's expertise, and guide those calls to someone with medical expertise who can address the concerns of the callers.

Patient Pre-Registration and Follow Up

Most patients dread a new doctor's first visit or come in half an hour early for a procedure just to do the necessary paperwork. A medical response provider can do pre-registration for you for this case.

It saves your workers a huge administrative burden, which frees them to deal with other issues in your workplace or healthcare facility. This not only improves their efficiency and effectiveness but it is also appreciated by patients. This saves them from having to work thirty minutes early and also reduces their stress level.

HIPAA Compliant Confidence

Answer services of the leading doctors can do all of these patient-centered, time-saving, and money-generating activities for you while staying compliant with HIPAA. With a medical answering service compliant for HIPAA, you can always be assured that the data of your patients is 100 percent safe at all times. It protects you and your practice, clinic, and hospital from the effects of non-compliance by an ill-equipped health-care response program that only dabbles.