Medical Answering Service, Telephone Answering Service – MedConnectUSA

All else being equal, a doctor’s office that uses an answering service has a competitive advantage over one that doesn’t. There are a number of reasons for this, and chief among them is the fact that it provides patients with a tremendous degree of peace of mind. The ability to get through to a medical professional, one way or the other, at any time of the night or day is really very comforting to people. This is especially true for patients with chronic diseases, but even healthy patients appreciate this level of access. It takes a lot of the worry out of life.

Another benefit of an answering service which can result in your office having a competitive advantage is that it increases your patients’ perception that you really care about them. Sometimes doctors have a reputation in their patients’ minds for being cold and disconnected. Admittedly, in many cases, this reputation is well deserved. Most of the time, however, it isn’t. By making the services of your office available to your patients around the clock, even if it’s through a third party, you communicate to them that you really care about their health even when they’re not sitting in your office right in front of you.

A third benefit is that your patients can sometimes save themselves some time and money by being able to talk to you or one of your colleagues before heading to the emergency room. Even for people who have health insurance, their emergency room copays are often substantially higher than their office visit copays. Thus, if they talk to you, and you tell them that they can safely wait and just visit your office the next day, then you can be saving them both a significant amount of money and a significant amount of time.

When you’re trying to decide which medical call center your office should contract with, there are certain questions you should ask each of the firms you’re considering. One of those questions is which steps they take in order to make sure their employees remain HIPAA compliant. After all, they will have access to some sensitive medical information about your patients. Ideally, the steps they take should go beyond initial HIPAA training, as important as that is. They should also offer periodic training refreshers, and they should conduct periodic testing to make sure that all of their employees are continuing to follow the regulations they’ve been trained on.

Another question you should ask them is what kind of steps they’ve taken to make sure they’re prepared for natural disasters. You want your patients’ calls to be able to get through to somebody no matter what. So, at the very least, a medical answering service should have backup generators in place that will kick in in the event of a power failure. Redundant phone lines are also a good idea, because sometimes phone service goes down independently of electricity. Ideally, a company should have multiple sites established, too. That way, if one of them has to close, calls ban be routed to another.

You should also ask them about what kinds of communications options are in place. They should be able to forward your messages to you in a way that blends well with the workflows already in place in your office. Often, these services are able to forward your messages to you in multiple ways at the same time. For example, transcripts of voice mails can be emailed to you for backup purposes, and you can be notified via text message whenever there is a voice mail waiting. Of course, in the most urgent situations, there should be someone for them to contact directly at any time.

Nurse telephone triage works in much the same way as triage works when it’s performed in person. A nurse asks a patient a number of questions in an effort to get a feel for their condition, and then makes decisions regarding the priority of their treatment. Often, the nurse is able to make recommendations for how the patient can treat themselves, saving them and the doctor some precious time. Also, this can save them some money. It’s usually a lot cheaper to stop by the pharmacy and pick up an over-the-counter drug than to shell out the money for an office visit, even if it’s a copayment.

There are a couple of different ways patients can avail themselves of this type of triage. Sometimes, a person’s health insurance plan will include access to a toll free number they can call to talk to a registered nurse twenty-four hours a day. The nurse will triage them, and if they need to proceed to the emergency room immediately, then he or she will let them know. On the other hand, if the patient just needs to make a normal appointment for a visit with their doctor, then that will be made clear as well. Many times, though, as we mentioned, all that’s needed is some simple self-treatment.

As a doctor’s office yourself, you can make it your policy for telephone triage to be available to your patients during your normal office hours. That way, before they even decide to set an appointment, they can talk to a nurse and find out whether or not an appointment is even necessary. If it sounds to your nurse like the caller is the mother of a child who has come down with a bug that’s been going around, it could very well be that he or she simply needs to provide the caller with that information.

Whether you’re shopping for your first physician answering service or deciding whether or not to renew your contract with them, there are certain things you should look for when you’re evaluating their performance. The suggestions we’re about to give you aren’t meant as an exhaustive list, but they are nonetheless important.  One factor you should consider is whether or not you’ve received any complaints from your patients about your answering service treating them rudely. To your patients, these answering service employees represent you as much as your front office staff. The same levels of courtesy should be required. If you’re shopping, you should find out if any of the company’s other clients have had this type of problem.

Efficiency is another factor you should consider. Reports should be available to you about call abandonment rates and average hold times. When your patients call your number, and are placed into a queue, if they have to wait very long in that queue, that reflects badly on you. This becomes even more important when you consider the fact that these call centers handle calls from a large number of clients. That shouldn’t be a deal breaker for you, but they need to be staffed accordingly. One tip here is that you want to do business with a firm that monitors their agents’ schedule adherence closely.

Security should be something else you think about. You should definitely avoid a firm that allows its employees to answer calls in their homes. This practice is both unprofessional and unsecure.  Document destruction should be handled reliably, and access to the facility itself should be by pass card or key code. Background checks should be performed prior to hiring any employee, too. After all, these people will have access to lots of information, the privacy of which is guaranteed by law.

A medical call center needs to have taken several steps in order to insure efficient disaster recovery. After all, the kinds of calls they take are far more important than those taken from people simply ordering widgets from a catalog. Medical calls need to get through no matter what. One of the steps which can be taken in order to make sure that this happens is the use of backup power generators. These need to be one of the kinds that kick in automatically in the event of a power failure, so that the call center’s power supply is never interrupted. That way, there will never be any down time.

Another step that needs to be taken is the use of redundant phone lines. That is, the call center needs to have more than one telephone service provider. In fact, the best ones even have access to satellite based telephone service. At first, this may seem, well, redundant. However, it creates a situation in which if one phone company’s lines go down, the center’s calls can still be routed through the other phone company’s lines. In the extremely rare, but possible, event that all phone lines are down in the whole area of the call center, they can then switch to their satellite phone service.

Speaking of still being able to handle calls, there is also one more step that can be taken. The call center you’re doing business with can set up a relationship with another one to handle each other’s calls. That way, in the event that one of them needs to close, all of their calls can still be answered by the other one. This is very useful, because sometimes all it takes is a good snowstorm to force a call center to close. Before you choose an answering service, ask them which of these plans they have in place.

If you’re one of the doctors that hasn’t yet started using a medical call answering service, then you’re in the minority. Still, there are some who are on the fence. If you’re in that category, then we have some thoughts which we’d like for you to consider. First of all, it will greatly benefit your patients. Knowing that they can reach someone any time they need to about their health concerns will be very comforting to them. Not only that, when you call them back, you may be able to save them some time and money by assuring them they don’t need to make the trip to the ER they’re thinking about.

It won’t just benefit your customers, though. It will also benefit you. By only taking calls from people with actual medical questions, you will have more free time. The answering service can handle general information requests and take messages for you. For that matter, you can also team up with some other doctors and take turns being on call. That way, each of you may only have to spend a night or two a week even being available at all! Your patients will still be taken care of, and you’ll have more time to spend with your friends and family members.

Assuming we’ve convinced you, and you’re ready to take the plunge, you need to be careful what service you sign up with. For one thing, you want to make sure that their HIPAA precautions are adequate. They need to have initial and recurrent training in place, and periodic testing to insure adherence. Also, there needs to be a plan in place for how calls will be handled in the event of a natural disaster. Power generators and redundant phone lines are part of this, as are call forwarding agreements with other facilities.

In order to derive the most benefit from the service provided to you by your medical call center, you need to maintain a good working relationship with them. One of the ways to do that is by clearly communicating your expectations. One area where this is obviously crucial is that of clearly spelling out the circumstances under which you need to be called directly, as opposed to those in which an emailed message will suffice. Of course, you obviously need to make sure that your answering service has at its disposal all of the general information your callers might request.

Another action on your part which would be beneficial to your relationship with your call center would be for you to evaluate their performance from time to time. One of the areas of performance you need to evaluate is their efficiency. How many of their calls wait in the queue so long that that the callers eventually hang up? This called a call abandonment rate in the industry. It is affected by managerial decisions in terms of staffing and by adherence to schedules on the part of the staff themselves. Reports of such things should be available to you at your request.

Another area of performance you need to evaluate is courtesy. The best way to do that is to conduct an informal poll of your patients. Of course, any particularly egregious transgressions in this department you’re likely to hear about anyway, but it’s still a good idea every now and then to ask some of your patients who have dealt with your answering service for some feedback on their experiences. Were they treated with respect? Did the people they talked to inspire confidence with their competence and professionalism? Remember, your patients make no distinction between your answering service and your front office staff.

Most patients prefer being able to talk to somebody at a live answering service over having to leave you a voice mail. There’s something about a live human voice that’s quite comforting. Thus, by making sure that every time someone calls your office, he or she gets to talk to a live, human voice, you are conveying a more caring, professional image. Plus, there are benefits of a live answering service for you, too; not just for your patients. In fact, those additional benefits, which we’re about to examine, probably help, in large part, to explain why people prefer listening to live human voices.

One of those additional benefits is that human beings are more adept at making judgment calls. Even the most sophisticated voice mail symptoms can only react to someone leaving a message based on a predefined set of instructions, provided by a human. A live person, on the other hand, can make a more specific decision about what would be the best course of action to take in response to any particular call. One clear example in this context is that a human can decide when to call you immediately and when to just take a message based on what the patient says.

Another advantage is closely related to the one we’ve just discussed. That is, a live person can, having made a judgment decision, react to an incoming call in a larger number of ways than a voice mail system. While a voice mail system can be programmed to notify you of an incoming message, human beings can do so much more than that. For example, a human being can take down a message, send you a text messaging alerting you to the fact that one is waiting, and transcribe that message into an email for you so you can easily read the whole thing at your convenience.

HIPAA training is vitally important in medical call centers. The employees in these call centers will have some of the same information the employees in your very own office have access to. As a result, for the protection of the privacy of your patients, it is crucial that you do business only with physician answering services which go to great lengths to insure HIPAA compliance. This doesn’t just protect your patients’ privacy, either. It also protects both you and the call center from any potential lawsuits that may arise as the result of a violation of these laws. Incidentally, the need for compliance in this area rules out any answering service that allows employees to take calls in their homes.

HIPAA training should be a part of the initial training of every employee, regardless of what role they will ultimately fulfill within the call center itself. The training shouldn’t stop there, though. Periodic refresher courses should also be mandatory for all employees. Not only that, random testing should be performed from time to time in an effort to make sure that all of those employees are continuing to adhere to all the guidelines they’ve been trained on. There are also steps call centers can take to ensure the security of sensitive information that go above and beyond these basic training requirements.

For example, these call centers should perform a criminal background check on all of their employees prior to hiring them. In addition, those employees should only have access to the facility itself via a key code or a pass card. That way, only people that have gone through those background checks will be in the building, where their eyes might fall upon some of that sensitive information. Finally, digital encryption should be utilized in all of the company’s software, and hard copy documents should be completely destroyed prior to leaving the building.

One of the ways to make sure you’re getting the most from your medical answering service is by educating yourself about what kinds of services they have to offer. By knowing what they can do for you, you are in a better position to make sure that you’re getting the most value for your money. For example, they can actually do a lot more for you than just taking down your messages. By providing them with specific instructions, they can communicate with you and your staff in whatever way works best with your already established office protocols. This includes forwarding copies of your messages by email or fax so that you can keep them in your files.

Another technique for making sure that you’re getting the most “bang for your buck,” so to speak, is to educate your patients. Often, you patients aren’t even aware that if they call your office after hours they’ll be able to talk to anybody. By explaining to them that your answering service has the ability to page you or one of your colleagues in the event of an emergency, you will be making it clear to them that you care about what happens to them, even after five pm. When their friends and family members hear how much you care about your patients, you might even get some new business out of it!

A final tip we have for you is that you should form a team of partners to respond to each other’s after-hours calls on a rotational basis. By teaming up with other doctors you trust, your patients will always have someone to take care of them, and each of you will have more time to enjoy with your families, even disconnected from the grid for a little while if you so desire.

When your patients call your office after hours, they don't want to just leave you a message (usually). Sometimes they do, but sometimes, they're calling to see whether or not you think they should report to the emergency room. Either way, people in general still prefer talking to living, breathing human beings over talking to machines. It inspires confidence, in part because humans are better equipped to make certain decisions than machines. So, the use of a live answering service creates a warmer, more personal experience for your patients, which we can assure you, they really appreciate. After all, wouldn't you?

Not only is the experience of talking to a live human being warmer and more personal, it's also more convenient. After all, it could be three in the morning, and their child could be coughing up something green. In that situation, some parents aren't going to want to wait until the next morning to talk to a doctor. It's convenient for you, too. If you just forwarded your office number to your cell phone after hours, you could be bombarded with cell phones, wrong numbers, and people calling for directions. This way, those calls can be handled without you ever being bothered.

This kind of service can save your patients money, too. One kind of money it can save them is emergency room co-pays. When they call you for advice, and you tell them just to come see you tomorrow, it could save them a small fortune, not to mention benefit the hospital by keeping their resources available. For that matter, it could also save them unnecessary office visit co-pays in situations where you simply recommend an over the counter remedy. So, as you can see, this type of service benefits you as much as it does your patients.

There are actually lots of different types of calls a medical call center might typically handle, but some of them are more common than others. In one of the most common types of calls, the person on the other end of the line wants to leave a message for the doctor that their two year old son's fever finally broke. Depending on how exactly that doctor has elected to receive his or her messages, the representative's system will then either send the doctor an email, a fax, a text, or some combination thereof, to be checked later. Another option would be to have a representative dictate messages into your voice mail.

Let's look at another type of call example. This time, the person on the other end of the phone says they are having chest pains, and they want to talk to their doctor. You are contacted by the representative immediately via a three way call. The reason for this is that you've given instructions to the answering service that whenever one of your patients mentions that they're  trying to decide whether or not to go to the emergency room, they are to contact you right away. After the representative drops out of the call, you tell your patient to go to the hospital. They do so, and  you end up saving their life. Even when callers don't end up going to the ER, they at least save money by avoiding that co-pay.

Yet a third type of call a medical call center would typically handle, and perhaps the most common type, is one in which the caller is simply looking for some basic information. By providing your answering service with your hours of operation, the address of your office, and some directions to it, you enable them to simply disclose this information to your callers when it's requested. That way, the only time you're ever even contacted is in the kinds of situations we've described above. As a result, more of your time is freed up for you to enjoy your already all-too-rare leisure.

Some doctors, perhaps including you, just use voice mail after hours. A live answering service, on the other hand, could greatly benefit not only your patients, but also your business. There are a number of ways this is true. In the first place, it will help you enjoy more of your free time, thus keeping your mental and emotional resources from being depleted. As a result, you will be better equipped to continue offering the quality care you've developed a reputation for. One of the ways this happens is that you're only notified immediately of calls you really need to know about right away.

Besides the fact that you get to avoid non medical calls that could easily be handled by someone else, you could actually avoid some medical calls, too! What we mean by that is that you could team up with other local doctors and take turns being on call after hours based on a rotational schedule. This would free you up even more time to spend with your friends and family members, which is already limited enough. Of course, just letting those calls go to voice mail would accomplish this goal, too, but then your patients wouldn't be getting the attention they deserve.

Providing this kind of immediate attention to your patients when they call could also benefit your business' bottom line in yet another way. By delighting your patients, they will not only keep coming back to you for years, they will tell their friends and family members how delighted they are, too! Thus assuming you're accepting new patients, this word-of-mouth advertising could result in an influx of them for you. Good word-of-mouth is more rare than bad word-of-mouth, so why not take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself to generate some? You and your patients will both be glad that you did.

The positive impact of the medical answering service on our nation's health care delivery system cannot be overstated. In order to appreciate the big picture of the difference that has been made, you need to consider the anecdotes we're about to describe happening hundreds, if not thousands of times every single day in places all over America. One of those anecdotes is a typical call. Imagine a patient calling a doctor's office after hours. They are experiencing some symptoms which lead them to believe they may need to go see their doctor, but they aren't entirely sure. They're calling to see if their thinking is on the right track.

That's a really common type of after hours call, especially considering current HMO regulations. Thus, when you or one of your on call partners is able to analyze a patient's symptoms and determine that it would be okay to just see them in your office the next day, you're making your local emergency room one patient less busy that night. As we all know, emergency room resources are often already tapped out to begin with, so this type of incident being repeated so often can really make a big difference, creating more efficient emergency rooms for the patients who really need them.

Of course, this doesn't just make a difference in terms of emergency rooms, either. Sometimes, those calls result in you being able to tell your patient that all they need is some type of over the counter medicine. In that case, your office is running more efficiently. When your office is running more efficiently, your patients have to spend less time in your waiting room, and everybody is a winner. Plus, being able to reach you or one of your partners any time they need to really makes your patients feel like you care about them.

Before we can understand how big a difference nurse telephone triage can make, some of us might need a little refresher on what exactly it is. In a nutshell, it's when a patients talks to a nurse on the phone, tells them their symptoms, and listens to their advice. It's different from just calling a medical answering service, because you don't have to wait for a call back from a doctor. You get to talk to a nurse right away. In the event your medical question cannot be answered by the nurse, he or she will tell you, and give you some guidance on what your next step should be.

It's easy to see how this benefits patients. They get access to accurate medical information any time the need it. It also benefits doctors, though, in that the nurse's advice or instructions are often sufficient to prevent an unnecessary doctor's office visit. The net result of this is that doctor's offices run more efficiently, dealing only with patients that have issues which truly require in person care. It also frees up resources in the rest of the health care delivery system. That's because it isn't just unnecessary office visits that can be prevented. Sometimes, unnecessary emergency room visits can be prevented as well.

There are two options for the delivery of such a system. One option and perhaps the most popular one, is being offered by more and more health insurance providers every year. In this option, patients call a toll free number that rings into a call center staffed by nurses twenty-four hours a day. This doesn't just save patients money, it saves the insurance companies money, too, and for the same reasons. The other option would be for you to make it a policy that your patients are able to call and talk to one of your nurses during your office hours.

There are different ways your physician answering service can communicate with you after a call comes in. Which method they will use will depend both on the nature of the call and the instructions you have left for the service. Assuming a message is being left, that message will then be forwarded to you somehow. If you like, you can elect to receive a text message notification every time there is a message waiting. Most doctors, however, only want to receive text messages when someone needs a call back immediately. That way, you won't be disturbed with nearly as much frequency.

As far as how exactly those messages are handled, there are several options for that as well. One common option is for the call center representatives to take the messages down and email them to you, where you can read them at your leisure. Another option is for representatives to dictate the messages into your voice mail. Faxing is also an option. Furthermore, you can elect to receive any combination of the above communications. Of course, as we've already alluded to, some of your calls will be for purposes other than to leave a message. It is to those purposes that we now turn our attention.

If someone calls and needs to talk to you immediately, as we mentioned before, you can receive a text message notification. That text message will usually contain the patient's name, phone number, and a brief description of their category of symptoms. You can set this up however you want, though. Another option when someone needs to talk to you other than receiving a text message is to be contacted immediately via a three way call. Once you're on the online with the patient, the answering service rep will then drop out of the call.

Assuming you've become convinced that your office needs the help of a medical call answering service, you may be interested to know a few things in particular you should be looking for. First, you want to make sure that the facility has enough staff and phone lines to handle additional call volume. Ask to see some reports of some of their recent handle times, and pay particularly close attention to the average amount of time callers have had to wait in the queue before having their calls answered. In the medical industry, this stat is even more important than it is in some other industries, though it is important in all of them.

Another thing you should be looking for is probably obvious, but we're going to specifically mention it anyway. You should be looking for a high level of professionalism and courtesy. In fact, you should expect no less of these from your call center's representatives than you would expect from your front office staff. When a patient dials your phone number, the person who answers the phone is a representative of your office, whether they work directly for you or not. Another area of professionalism that is required is that of confidentiality. After all, these people will have access to sensitive information about your patients.

Another area you should evaluate is that of disaster preparedness. What happens if your calls are being forwarded and the place they're being forwarded to loses power? There should be backup generators in place. There should also be arrangements in place to forward calls to another facility in the event that none of the employees are able to report to work. Another thing to look for is redundant phone lines. Sometimes power remains even after phone lines fail. In brief, these businesses should be prepared for all contingencies.

HIPAA training is really important to medical call centers. These people are going to have access to large volumes of sensitive information about your patients, so you're going to want to make sure that they adhere to all of the applicable regulations. That's why they offer this training, but it doesn't end there. Refresher courses are also given on a a regular basis. In addition, various checks are in place to ensure that compliance is maintained. Of course, there are also other points at which a medical call center needs to be HIPAA compliant. Let's take a look at a few of those.

Regulations specify the importance of keeping medical information secure. There are two essential measures answering services utilize in order to fulfill that requirement. The first of these is the use of digital security systems, and the second is the use of physical security systems. By physical security systems, we mean security cameras and pass card locks on the building itself. That way, no one who isn't currently working there is permitted access. For that matter, only people who have passed thorough background checks are permitted to work there in the first place. That way, many potential problems are prevented before they ever even happen.

One category of digital security in use by these facilities pertains to their communications. When information is being transmitted to your office, it is particularly prone to being compromised. Therefore, state of the art encryption is employed, along with password protection, to ensure that sensitive information makes it only into the hands of people who are supposed to see it. In fact, even the text messages you receive are sent on a special platform which you have to sign into, bypassing your carrier's text messaging system entirely. At every step along the way, every available means of protection is used, HIPAA training included.

There are lots of different types of disasters that could happen at a medical call center, and some of them are more severe than others. However, in any event, your answering service still needs to be able to take your calls whenever you need them to. That's why disaster recovery methods are so important. One of the more common (surprisingly) “disasters” a call center is liable to face is a power failure. Thus, they need to be prepared for this whether it is short or long in duration. Battery based uninterpretable power supplies can kick in and provide a couple of hours of energy automatically. After that, gas generators can run indefinitely.

A lesser disaster can knock out phone lines even if it doesn't knock out electricity. One way to be prepared for this is to have redundant phone lines available that come from different geographical directions. That way, if one set goes down, calls can be routed through another set. Another option is to have satellite phone service available, too, so that in the unlikley event all phone lines go down in the area of the facility calls can still be handled via that satellite system. The ultimate step in terms of being prepared to still handle calls no matter what is for the office to either have multiple locations or form a partnership with another company to handle calls in the event of total incapacity.

One type of thing you typically don't think about in terms of disaster recovery, which is nonetheless relevant to this discussion, is security. After all, your medical answering service will have access to a large volume of confidential information about your patients. Therefore, digital security systems should be in place, as well as security systems to protect the building itself. Security cameras and pass card systems are both excellent for this purpose.

It might be helpful to consider exactly what happens when a call comes in to a medical answering service. In the first place, a patient dials the number to your office. Assuming it's after hours, or all your lines are busy, the call is then forwarded to a call center. If all of the lines are busy in the call center, the call is then placed into a queue. Medical facilities in particular try to keep the queue times as short as possible. Once there is a line free, the call is answered. What happens next depends on the nature of the call.

If the caller just wants to leave a message, the representative simply gathers the required information. If the caller is interested in your hours or location, the representative provides them. If the caller has a medical question, then you or your on call partner are contacted. You're then able to dialogue directly with the patient as needed in order to gather further information or provide additional instructions. As a result of using this type of system, calls only make it through to you in the event the caller has a medical question of some kind. The net effect of this is that you are interrupted less, but still reached when needed.

Exactly how you're contacted depends on your predetermined preferences. For example, if you want to, you could define some conditions under which the representative's instructions are to immediately place a three way call to your cell phone. For example, if one of your patients mentions that they're wondering whether or not to go to the E.R., you could be brought into the call immediately. Another option, appropriate to less urgent situations, would be to text you the patient's info so you can call them back later. These are the benefits of a medical answering service.