Why Should Your Medical Office Use An Off-site Receptionist?

Virtual Medical Receptionist: How It Can Save Your Practice Time & Money

Medical practices are continually facing challenges as healthcare technologies expand and patient expectations rise. Although this provides the promise of better patient care, it also has a significant effect on the working day not only of doctors but on all other workers working in a medical practice or office. Support is luckily available in the form of virtual receptionists that can ease the strain of bureaucracy in modern healthcare and allow the workers in your practice to concentrate on those critical areas that require the greatest attention. And, once a virtual medical receptionist is in place, you will discover that your practice can begin to exceed patients’ expectations and deliver a world-class service that benefits everyone involved.

The Lowdown on Virtual Receptionists

A virtual medical receptionist is a remote worker that can serve as the first point of contact for your practice and is cost-effective and easy to incorporate into your practice. Undertaking all the duties associated with an in-house receptionist, a virtual medical receptionist can treat incoming calls, schedule and confirm appointments, conduct medical insurance verifications, deal with prescription refills and make arrangements for referrals to patients.

The Benefits of a Virtual Medical Receptionist

• Free Up Time to Spend with Patients

One of the big challenges doctors face is not being able to spend adequate time with their patients. Medical conditions can be extremely complicated, but when a doctor is dealing with a weak backup offered by an unreliable telephone system, each appointment in their schedule needs to be shortened in duration to ensure that every patient is seen.

During this case, the patient not only gets the short end of the stick, but the doctor is still left disappointed as they can not function to their maximum capacity. Nevertheless, with a virtual receptionist in place, you will find that the telephone system is becoming more effective and there is less need to distribute the workload of administration around the company. As a result, doctors are less in a hurry and can give patients full attention.

• High Levels of Customer Care and Service

When your patients have poor clinical interactions otherwise you will quickly find that they will stop coming back. Alternatively, they should look at visiting practices that are strong and above all else respected for prizing the needs of their patients. And, at times, this may be triggered by something as basic as the lack of consideration displayed when scheduling appointments or, at other times, the general sense of confusion in a poorly managed clinic.

However, virtual receptionists are closely supervised and their performance measured and graded regularly. It helps give practices the opportunity to consider the degree of quality that is being put into their workplace and has the added benefit to give virtual receptionists a measurable goal to work towards. And that will only help boost the credibility of your practice for excellent care, as well as grow your virtual medical receptionist's customer service skills.

• No Need for an Answering Service

Rather than an individual receptionist at the front desk, many companies rely on an answering service to deal with customer inquiries. Although this means that patients are able to disclose problems at least, the fact is that when they hear the flat, emotionless answer service message kick in, many patients are susceptible to hanging up.

It obviously doesn't do any favors to your practice or the patient, but you can have a more interactive means of contact with a virtual receptionist in a position to keep your patients happy. And it's also important to note that you don't only have one virtual receptionist, you can have as many as you want.

• More Cost-Effective

Staffing can be a major area of concern for practices that want to be cost-effective. Of course, there is the question of wages, but it is also necessary to note that there are costs of facilities and hidden costs including wear and tear.

Nevertheless, virtual receptionists support practices by their remote capabilities to sidestep these unproductive costs neatly. Digital receptionists are an extremely cost-effective option when it comes to meeting the needs of your patients as well as the needs of the practice as a whole by having almost no physical presence in your office.

• Reduce the Admin Workload 

Running a medical practice is not a simple business and with the rapid increase of new legislation and new procedures, the paperwork involved is becoming a real nightmare; in-house admin staff finds that more and more of their time is being taken up with menial tasks which offer little value to the practice and its patients.