Medical Answering Service, Telephone Answering Service – MedConnectUSA

In the medical industry patient support is key to the growth of your business. Without proper client service your patients will find another medical practice that treats them in a better way. But what exactly is patient support and how will it help your business grow? One tool that is often overlooked by medical personnel is the use of an answering service to provide customer support to patients during non-business hours. Below is a guide to how a live answering service can help your business and your patients.

Unless you are superman chances are that there are times when you are not in your office to answer your calls. Because you can’t be everywhere at once, and because hiring a full-time employee can be too expensive, an call center service can be the answer for your business. But do live call centers really make a difference?

The best way to use a live answering service is during the times when you are not in your office or clinic. This includes after business hours or during lunch. It is important to note that just because you are not working it does not mean that your patients will not have a need for your services. An answering service can help patients when you are unable to, and they can take messages for you too. Answering service operators also have access to patient information so that they can help your patients make informed decisions and answer any of their medical questions.

Most patients who encounter a live answering service will appreciate being able to talk to a live person when they call you, especially if they are not feeling well. Most importantly with the help of a call center service you will never have to miss a phone call from your patients again. This is the true essence of patient support.

If you are running a health care business chances are that there have been times when you were unable to answer the phone either because you or your receptionist were both busy with clients or because your office was closed. This might happen fairly often during lunch hours or after the office has been closed for the day. While many people utilize answering machines and voicemail services there is another way to have your calls answered while providing the service and care that your patients want.

By utilizing an answering service with a virtual receptionist you can ensure that your patients will always be able to speak with somebody when they call with their health questions or concerns. This can be especially important when you are running a health care service because oftentimes patients need help or advice after hours. By using a medical answering service you can be sure that your patients will receive professional advice and help, and you will be kept up-to-date with your patient’s health activity.

If you have made the decision to take advantage of a medical answering service one of the first things you will need to do is decide which company to hire. There are many types of medical virtual receptionists but you want to be sure that the company you hire works only with receptionists who are qualified to speak with patients. Additionally, you want to make sure that any call center you hire is also up-to-date with all HIPAA laws and training.

Once you have found a qualifying answering service all you will need to do is send them information on how you would like your phone answered and when and how you would like your messages received or calls forwarded to you. With the help of an answering service your business will be ready to start recieving all the phone calls you may have been missing up until now.

It is important when you run your own medical office that you are able to rely on everyone who works for you. This is true of everyone from your receptionist to your janitor. If you contract out any of your work out, such as medical billing or after hour answering services, you need to make sure that the workers you have hired are dependable and adept at working with medical practices. For example, when you hire an answering service you should understand the differences between a medical live answering service and a general call center. Hiring one over the other could make all the difference for your medical practice.

A medical live answering service hires employees that are HIPAA trained as well as those who are experienced at working with customers who are experiencing medical emergencies. Most medical answering services will be able to offer help and answer your patient’s general medical questions as well as view their medical records and give them more personal service.

A general answering service on the other hand will only be able to answer your calls, take messages, and forward calls. This is a great service to have but if you are a medical professional it is better to trust your answering service to qualified professionals who have experience working within the medical field. Additionally, general answering services will not be HIPPA trained, an important factor for you and your medical office.

Before you hire just any answering service you should take into account the specific needs of your medical office. Working with professionals who are trained to work with medical patients will be more beneficial for you and your patients in the long run. After all, while owning a small medical practice can keep you busy most people find that the rewards of helping their patients, even through the phone, are well worth it.

Working with a medical answering service can be extremely beneficial to you and your medical practice. Not only will you be able to better help your patients by offering them after hour phone services, but you will also be more organized and efficient with someone else handling the phone calls that you are unable to get to. However, there are also some challenges that you should be aware of when you are using a medical call center. By keeping these challenges in mind you will be more likely to get the most out of your outsourced answering service.

Privacy Issues

All health care services are responsible for keeping their patient’s information safe. As a health care provider your office may have access to a lot of sensitive patient information such as their financial and health history. For this reason the Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act was passed in 1996, which holds all medical offices and personnel responsible for ensuring patient privacy. When you hire a medical answering service it is important that you remain HIPAA compliant or you and your staff could be held accountable for violations.

Security Issues

In fact, HIPAA is so important to the health care field that there are many security challenges that have to do with keeping electronic information safe as well. Because of this your medical answering service needs to undergo regular HIPAA training so that they know the importance of patient security and how to handle information safely. After all, they will have access to electronic files.

While hiring a medical answering service can ultimately strengthen your practice you should always ensure that the service you hire is just as qualified as any of the employees that you hire to work in your physical office. By doing so you will never have to worry about whether or not you, and your employees, are following proper protocol at all times.

How do you service and provide help to patients without them having to physically come into your office? Easy, you have a nurse telephone triage set up that patients can access at all hours. A telephone triage utilizes the experience of a trained registered nurse to speak with patients by phone so that they can have their symptoms and health concerns analyzed and answered. While a nurse telephone triage can’t replace a doctor or physician it can take the place of a doctor’s appointment if there is no medical emergency being experienced. Additionally, nurses can also let patients know if it is important that they come in to see their doctor or visit an emergency room right away.

When patients call a nurse telephone triage they may receive advice and recommendations from the nurse on call. A nurse might also explain what the patient’s options are or transfer them to another department if needed. Additionally, a nurse should make a log of each call so that it can be referred to within a patient’s health history. Using a telephone triage can help busy clinic and health offices by allowing patients to continue receiving health advice without having to come in to see a doctor every single time they have a question or a small medical situation.

The most important thing to remember when you are using a nurse telephone triage is that patients who use the phone system should be treated with the same level of care as those that come into the clinic. This means that the nurse who answers phone calls should be equipped to handle calls that range from patients who need advice on medication to true emergencies. A telephone triage nurse will never experience days that are all the same. Each phone call will be different and patients should all be treated with personal advice and care.

Using a physician answering service can end up providing you with a large number of benefits that you would not otherwise have. It is important whenever you are getting ready to hire an answering service that you take the time to find one that offers you the largest amount of benefits that are important to you. This way once the answering service begins receiving calls you will know that you are covered in every way for your business needs. Below are some of the most common types of support that are offered by a physician answering service.

24 Hour Service

Is your telephone answering service available at all hours of the day to take calls from your patients? Whether a patient is calling at lunch time or at 1:00 a.m. you want to make sure that there is always someone available to answer their questions and give them advice.

Personalized Messages

Your physician answering service should be able to tailor a script for how to answer the phone and provide advice to your office. You want them to come across as professional as if they were answering the phone directly in your office.

Message Delivery

You should ask if there are options to how you get your messages delivered to you. You may want all your messages at once or you may want messages to be sent to your throughout the day. You may even like to have messages sent to you immediately after each call. Additionally, you should have options on how to receive your messages whether by email, text, fax, or telephone.

The right physician answering service for you will be one that allows you to customize their services to fit your needs. If they offer 24 hour service, personalized messages, and personalized message delivery you will be able to get much more personal service that you can be confident in.

Have you sat in your waiting room for more than five minutes recently? Many medical facility managers believe that what was once adequate for their clients years ago will still be suitable today. However, if you want to be more than “adequate,” and would like to create a warm, welcome atmosphere for your patients, then it may be time to revamp your waiting room area. The tone that your waiting room sets for your clients is likely to set the tone for the rest of their visit. As with many things in life, making a good first impression is vital for the success of your clinic.

Create a Relaxing Atmosphere

Whether you run a dentist’s office or any other medical facility, chances are that your clients are not all that excited about their visit. Most people feel a little on edge when going to a medical facility, even if they are only coming in for a routine exam or routine dental cleaning. A cold, clinical waiting room with plastic chairs and elevator music, for example, will only add to their discomfort. On the other hand, classical music or other types of relaxing music (music made for spas is a great choice), along with comfortable furnishings will put your patients at ease from the moment they step into your waiting room. Extra features such as water wall signs that include your brand name as a backdrop for flowing water will also work to calm the body and mind.

Comfortable and Practical

While you should stay away from cold, clinical design elements, you also don’t want to overdo it. In other words, it’s important to maintain a professional atmosphere so that your patients feel confident in your services. You can maintain this professional environment while also adding comfortable furnishings. Make sure that the checkout area is easily accessible and that your patients do not have to walk through a maze to get to it. Your waiting room staff should be in view when your patients step into the waiting room so that they are welcomed right away.

Seating

Of course, seating is an absolute must in a waiting room. Steer away from too many couches in medical waiting rooms. Most patients will appreciate a little distance, even if it’s only the small barrier that sofa chairs provide. Sofa chairs are also ideal because they provide sturdy arms for elderly or disabled patients to get up or down. Depending on the size of your waiting room, one or two couches will work well for families with young children.

Lighting

If possible, light the room with as much natural light from windows as possible. If the windows in your facility face out to a parking lot or other less-than-pleasant view, consider planting a tree near the window to add a bit of nature. If your waiting room does not have windows, purchase full spectrum lights to add a pleasant and more natural light to the space. Be sure to plug socket protectors into any unused plugs to protect young children.

Relaxing Diversions

A growing number of medical clinics are removing televisions from their waiting rooms. If patients are already on edge, the last thing they want is to listen to constant chatter or disturbing news stories. Relaxing music, logo fountains, a large fish aquarium, and other calming diversions will set your patients minds and bodies at ease.

The “brand” of your facility begins in the waiting room. By putting extra effort in this area of your facility, you will demonstrate that you strive for exemplary patient services from the moment your patients walk in the door.

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As a medical center you are aware that you need to be HIPAA compliant at all times. The Health Insurance Accountability and Portability Act, also known as HIPAA, protects patients and their information from being shared without their consent. This is an important act for health care centers to employ because if they do not maintain patient confidentiality at all times they could end up in legal trouble. Additionally, although an answering service is not technically a medical center employee they are still contracted under the center and they should also partake in HIPAA training since they will also need to be HIPAA compliant whenever they speak with your patients or not.

Not all answering services participate in HIPAA training but those that do will be able to answer patient calls without putting their information in jeopardy. Many call centers are given access to customer health history so that they can help each patient by offering personal assistance. In addition, call centers often fill out logs for each customer call so that the information can easily be passed back to the medical facility. With all of the private information being accessed and recorded HIPAA training can be important for call centers who want to make sure that each piece of information is treated sensitively.

If you are unsure whether your current answering service provides their employees with HIPAA training make sure to bring it up with your account manager immediately. If they are not currently HIPAA compliant ask them whether they plan to be in the immediate future. Unfortunately, you may need to find a new answering service that is compliant with HIPAA standards, because legally you are responsible for ensuring compliancy across all areas of your medical center. However, by taking care of this very important part of your business you can make sure that you do not come across any legal problems later on.

There are many ways to prepare your business for a disaster. Disaster recovery can include offsite electronic backup files to access customer information in case of a natural disaster or coming up with a plan on where employees should meet during a disaster. One of the most important ways that a medical center can plan for a disaster is by setting up a call center which will pick up calls whenever medical employees are unavailable to do so. During a disaster phone lines may or may not be available. Patients may need medical attention or they may wonder if they should come in for any prearranged appointments. By setting up an answering service you can offer care to your patients even though your office is not available.

If you are interested in setting up an answering service as part of your disaster recovery plan you should make sure that the company you utilize is aware of your particular business needs. You should decide whether you want to use the answering service for more than just disaster recovery. Most medical offices also utilize call centers during after hours or lunch hours. This can also be a good way for you to see whether or not the call center you have hired works for you.

Once you have set up an answering service you will want to give them instructions on how to answer the phone and how to forward and help your patients. One of the best things about an answering service is that you can tailor messages from them to fit your office. You will also want to make sure that you give them a separate script and instructions for your disaster recovery plan. With a little planning and forethought your office can manage through any type of disaster and your patients can continue receiving the same type of care that you regularly give them.

When you work in the health care field you often receive calls from patients needing medical advice when you are out of the office. You obviously cannot be at your health care practice 24 hours a day, but you would like to be able to offer your patients the comfort of a human voice rather than an electronic answering machine which is impersonal. Many patients will not even leave a message leaving you with no idea that they have called or that they need medical advice.

A medical call center can provide a link between you and your patients by letting you know who has called, and at what time, as well as being able to forward calls if it is appropriate. Additionally, medical call centers can keep a record of calls so that you can easily keep track of your patient’s needs without having to dig through phone logs or worse, having to ask the patient themselves.

Most importantly a medical call center will be able to provide each of your patients with personal service. Because medical answering services are specialized they are trained on how to interpret a patient’s history and how to offer them help within certain limitations. They are adept at handling medical problems and they have customer service experience so that a patient can feel at ease talking with their receptionists. Additionally, medical call centers can schedule appointments, forward messages, handle emergencies, and keep detailed records for you of each and every call.

While it would be nice if you were able to answer the phone every time a patient calls a medical call center is the next best thing for patients who want to speak with a live doctor. If you have not experienced working with a call center yet you will be surprised at how quick and easy it is to do so.

Larger medical offices often take advantage of answering services to take care of their patient phone calls when they are not in the office, but what about small offices? Can they receive the same level of benefits from a medical call answering service as their larger counterparts? Actually, many small offices can benefit even more so than larger office because of their little size. Below is a guide to benefits that small offices will receive when they hire a medical call answering service to take care of their after hour calls.

Small medical offices sometimes experience shortage in staff if only one person is unable to come in. During these times the phones may become neglected throughout the day because everyone is busy trying to fill in for the missing staff member. This can lead to missed calls from patients who need medical advice or help or missed calls from people who are not patients and are looking for a new doctor. Additionally, when the phone lines are neglected there is often an overflow of phone messages that need to be listened to once there is free time to do so. However, depending on how many people called it may take a lot of time to listen to each message. In fact, listening to messages often becomes a waste of time for employees who are not able to get anything else done.

Using a medical call answering service can be helpful to small businesses that may need the extra help with answering phones so that the rest of the office employees are able to focus on other important tasks. In fact, hiring an answering service can help your small business to begin expanding and growing since there will be less time using the phone and more time taking care of patients.

A medical call center can be an important part of your business. When patients need information or want to make an appointment call centers can help them out while you are out of the office. Many present day medical centers utilize call centers because they understand that their current patients appreciate the extra service and prospective patients may end up becoming current patients because of it. Below are three tips on making the most of your answering service so that you can best care for your patients, even when you are not available to answer a call yourself.

Use Scripts

The use of scripts is extremely common in the business world because they make the customer experience more easily controlled. When call center employees do not use scripts it can be very easy for things to go awry. However, by using a script agents will know how to respond to each situation in a way that best represents your medical office.

HIPAA Training

Make sure that whichever call center you hire has every employee participate in HIPAA training. The call center agents will often have access to sensitive customer information and they need to know how to handle it so that your center will never fall into legal problems.

Use a 24/7 Company

Any answering service that you use should be available 24 hours a day seven days a week. You will mostly be utilizing them during the hours that you are not available which will likely be at night and during the early morning hours. Make sure that your call center is available during these times when customers may call you for advice.

Do not be afraid of demanding a lot from your call center. An answering service works for you and it needs to meet your business needs otherwise it will not be useful. Keep these things in mind when you are hiring your call center so that you are happy with the service being provided.

One of the things that make for a great medical answering service is the maintenance of a certain level of professionalism. One of the keys to maintaining this level of professionalism is hiring the right employees to begin with. Thus, before you hire such a service to handle your after-hours calls, it’s a good idea to make sure that they have rigorous background checks in place as part of their hiring process. This increases the chance that they’ll hire the same caliber of people you would personally choose to answer phone calls from your patients if you were hiring them yourself.

Disaster preparedness is another plus for such a service. After all, if they aren’t available to answer your patient’s calls when they come in, then they aren’t accomplishing the purpose for which you hired them. There are a number of practices these call centers should engage in order to make sure they’re always available to handle any calls that come in. One of those practices is the use of uninterruptible power supplies, and another good idea is to have redundant phone lines in place. That way, if one set of phone lines goes down, calls can be routed through the other set.

HIPAA training is another key component of quality in such a call center. In fact, it’s a must. Remember, your call center will have access to certain sensitive medical information about your patients. Therefore, there are certain practices they are going to need to have in place to make sure that the integrity of that information isn’t compromised. Examples of these types of systems include physical and virtual security mechanisms, secured document destruction, and HIPAA training both when a new employee is hired and from time to time to make sure that HIPAA regulations are still being adhered to.

If your office still uses voice mail to receive communication from your patients, then you may want to consider upgrading to a live answering service. There are a lot of reasons for this recommendation, and one of those reasons is that human beings are more intelligent than voice mail systems, even the most sophisticated ones. With a voice mail system, you have the option to have it notify you automatically of every incoming message or simply checking it every now and then. On the other hand, a human being is able to follow instructions regarding your preferred course of action based on the nature of each individual call.

Another advantage of one of these answering services over a traditional voice mail system is that you can easily measure whether or not it’s meeting your expectations. When a human being answers the phone, it is far less likely that your caller will simply hang up on them than it is that they will hang up on your voice mail greeting. Plus, a call center will employ various quality insurance mechanisms to ensure that during that conversation, your patient has a positive experience. You may be worried about hold times, but there are also metrics used by such call centers to ensure that these are kept to a minimum.

Professionalism is an important advantage of this type of answering service as well. The fact that you’ve gone the extra mile to make sure that a human being will answer your office’s phone calls even when you’re closed will really make a positive impact on your patients. Just make sure that you don’t hire one of those companies that allow their employees to take calls from home, because there might be background noises that would conflict with the professional image you’re trying to project.

The use of an answering service in your medial practice has become even more of a necessity in modern times. It is getting to the point where patients expect their doctor’s offices to be available to them twenty-four hours a day, and such a service provides you a practical way to offer them that without exhausting yourself. Though there are a number of benefits associated with this from the perspective of your patients, there is an awful lot in it for you as a doctor as well. For example, since these services are able to provide information to you in a number of different ways based on the situations that arise, it’s a convenient way to prioritize the actions that you need to take in response.

For example, if one of your patients dials your office’s phone number in the middle of the night, and that call is forwarded to your answering service, that answering service will have a specific set of instructions, which can be refined by you personally. This will govern how they handle that call. Obviously, if the patient is complaining of chest pains, the call center representative will get them in touch with emergency services. If however, the symptoms are less life threatening, the typical procedure will be to forward you a message to call your patient back so you can answer their questions and make recommendations.

Needless to say, this kind of answering service can provide you a tremendous level of peace of mind, knowing that the well-being of your patients is being looked after around the clock. In addition, it can provide you some much needed time to yourself, since you won’t have to provide your home or cell phone number to your patients in order for them to be able to reach you when they really need to.

Nurse telephone triage doesn’t just benefit your patients. It also benefits you. However, before we go into any further detail about how exactly it benefits you, let’s take a closer look at how it benefits your patients. There are actually two ways it benefits your patients that we’d like to remind you of, and one of them is that it saves them money. Even if they have health insurance, they still have to have the money to make their copayments and/or deductibles in order to be able to see you. Especially for people who are already living on a tight budget, this can be more difficult than you might realize.

Therefore, if your patients are able to communicate with a nurse about their common health questions, they may discover that they don’t need as many appointments with you as they thought they did. In fact, it could be that they discover, as a result of that communication, that there is an over-the-counter remedy available to them that would suffice just as well as a visit with you. As we alluded to a moment ago, this benefits you in addition to benefitting them. When you have enough patients to see in order to stay busy, but not so many that you can barely keep up, you are able to provide a higher level of service to everyone.

There is another way in which this type of triage can benefit your patients that, in our opinion, doesn’t get emphasized often enough. It’s a really simple one, but sometimes it gets lost in the morass of other benefits. It improves the health of your patients! By being able to get answers to health questions from qualified professionals, instead of researching these things themselves on the internet, your patients will be far better taken care of.

There are a lot of benefits in store for you as a doctor when you contract with a medical call center. However, not all of them are talked about as much as the others. For example, you may not have considered all of the ways in which giving your patients access to a medical call center when your office is closed can help you build your business. When a patient is trying to choose a doctor, if you can position yourself as someone who is going to be available to them twenty-four hours a day, then that can be a great selling point. That may sound impossible to you, but with a live answering service, you can do it.

Normally, the only way to make yourself available to your patients twenty-four hours a day would be to provide them with your cell phone number. As a doctor, you already realize how rare and precious your free time is, and you can easily understand how doing something like that could easily destroy what little bit of it you might have left. By having your calls forwarded to an answering service, you can make sure that the only callers that make it through to you are ones that really have medical questions. If people are calling for other reasons, the representatives can simply provide general information or take (and forward) a message, whichever is appropriate.

Already, you can see how that would free up more of your time, but there is a way to free it up even further still. Many doctors have had great success forming partnerships to handle each other’s calls. In a network with six other doctors, each of you would only need to be on call one night a week, and everyone’s calls in that group could be forwarded to whomever is scheduled for the night.

If your office contracts with a medical call center to handle your incoming calls after hours, your patients are likely to view that as a tremendous convenience. At first, you may be a little surprised to hear that. You may have thought that your patients would view it as impersonal. However, when you consider the alternative, which is a voice mail system, you can easily remember that the majority of people vastly prefer communicating with a live human being over communicating with a machine, no matter how sophisticated that machine may be. The ability to pick up the phone and get a message through to one of their doctors without having to wait for those doctors to check their voice mail boxes gives people a lot of peace of mind.

However, you will need to remember that your patients will also view this call center as an extension of your office. That’s why it’s so important to make your decisions about which one to hire, or whether or not to renew your contract, very carefully. After all, as far as your patients are concerned, the person on the other end of the line works for you as much as the person in your front office. Therefore, you want the same level of professionalism and courtesy. That’s one reason it’s so important to stay away from any call center that allows its employees to take calls from home. There’s too much risk of unprofessional background noises.

Another way your patients will view the fact that you offer them this level of access is that it will remind them that you care about their health more than just when they’re in your office. In today’s competitive health care market, it’s important that your patients know you’re willing to go the extra mile in order to earn their loyalty.

HIPAA training is just as important for any medical answering service you choose to do business with as it is for your office staff themselves. Though it will be more limited, the employees of these call centers will have access to some of the same protected medical information about your patients that they would have if they worked in your office itself. Therefore, it’s vital that these types of businesses not only train their new hires on the appropriate HIPAA procedures, but also perform periodic evaluations in order to make sure that their employees are continuing to adhere to those procedures. However, HIPAA training itself, as important as it is, isn’t the only important security measure your call center should utilize.

For example, call centers should use certified document destruction contractors to ensure that documents are destroyed before they leave their facilities. In addition to that, they should regulate who has access to those facilities, both physically and virtually. The most common ways to do that are through the use of key cards and passcodes because they can be reprogrammed to prevent former employees from still being able to access these call centers after their employment periods have ended. Speaking of their employment periods, another important security measure is that those employment periods should never even begin without thorough background checks.

Other than background checks and HIPAA training itself, the security measures we mentioned in the preceding paragraph all require a continuous supply of electricity for their execution. Therefore, the maintenance of an uninterruptible power supply is, in and of itself, an additional, recommended security measure for these types of call centers. If there were a power failure, then important tools such as alarm systems may cease to operate, leaving these facilities vulnerable. Also, without the power to do so, the facility will no longer be able to handle your calls.

In order to get the most out of your physician answering service, you need to carefully define your expectations of them. When a call reaches the call center you’ve hired, it can be handled several different ways, depending on the precise nature of the call itself. For example, if the caller is simply requesting some general information about your practice, such as directions to your office or your hours of operation, the representative can simply provide the requested information, as long as you’ve supplied them with it. You should also provide them with a way to tell when you want to be contacted immediately, and when the simple taking of a message would suffice.

In addition to clearly defining your expectations, you should also carefully monitor your results. One way to do that is through your patients. If any of them ever report to you anything amiss with their interactions with your call center, then you should contact your call center and inquire about the incident. It may even be possible to review a recording of the call in question when necessary. However, even if you never hear anything negative about your call center from your patients, you should still ask them from time to time to describe the experiences they’ve had when calling your office phone number after hours.

One of the best ways to get the most out of this type of service is to choose it wisely in the first place. In addition to the kind of quality and professionalism we’ve already hinted at, you should look for adequate security measures and disaster preparedness. Virtual and physical security systems should be in place, and backup power generators should be on hand in the event of a power failure. That way, the center will still be able to take your calls and maintain their security systems.