Medical Answering Service, Telephone Answering Service – MedConnectUSA

If you already have a medical call answering service, then you are definitely taking a step in the right direction. You are showing your patients that you truly care for their healthcare by making sure they can always reach someone when they call. However, there is always room for improvement in everything you do with your company. One way you can improve your call center is to make sure you choose an answering service that offers disaster recovery.

Just what is disaster recovery? This is a plan to manage patient phone calls if your facility faces a disaster that leads to closure for a short term. There could be many things that happen like fire, flooding, burglary or inclement weather that could make it where you need to close your facility until it can be repaired. During this time, you must make sure your patients are cared for. If they try to call and they cannot get an answer, they will not know what to do. This is why disaster recovery matters.

In such a situation, your call center will step up to field all customer telephone calls. They will be able to explain the situation, answer basic questions and even redirect your patients to an alternate healthcare facility in the meantime. This type of service should be available as an add-on or as a part of your call center plan. You do not want to leave your patients abandoned even if you have to close your facility for a short term.

You cannot predict when you may face disaster. You are already taking steps to make sure your patients are well cared for even when your facility is closed, but you can make improvements by making sure your answering service has a disaster recovery plan to deal with anything that may happen.

Throughout snowstorms, hurricanes, tornados, floods, and other unplanned calamities, people still get sick, have accidents, and need medical attention.  Any doctor's office or clinic has to have a disaster recovery plan in place before the unexpected takes down lines of communication and knocks out primary power.  These are the times when you learn how good your answering service really is.

In public emergencies, it is common for the most needed services to be closed down because there are lost microwave signals as well as downed backup power supplies.  When the health and welfare of a great many people is at stake, it is not good enough to say simply that all communications are gone.

During an emergency caused by utility outages, it is not the time to learn that the answering service has no plan on what to do.  It isn't possible to have a disaster recovery without some services conducting business that require a source of power and a way of communicating with the public.

The medical profession is often the most needed in a time of disaster recovery because many of the causes of those disasters result in the injury of people and loss of home health care facilities.  The answering services that are set up to utilize backup generators and that can divert phone calls to areas that are still operational are the ones who earn their keep.

In many cases, people in need will have to wait for assistance in trying times, but their ability to have their plight recognized because of an answering service that stays online ensures that they can get help sooner when transportation and communication are returned.

If a medical facility, doctor's office, or clinic does not have a suitable backup for communication, clients may decide to go somewhere else for their medical care.

Disaster recovery should be a key feature of any medical call center your practice considers using. It certainly sounds important, but what exactly does recovery from disasters mean for your business and your patients?

A physician’s call center should offer two types of disaster related recovery services.

Data Security and Protection

Natural disasters such as floods and fires can put your medical practice’s messages and related patient and business data at risk. This is true of your practice itself, but damages can also destroy vital data at your call center if it doesn’t have a recovery plan in place.

Technology is the backbone of call center’s disaster recovery plans and practices. This is what will protect your all important information and messages in the event a power outage, vandalism or some natural disaster compromises the security or stability of your physician’s call center. High-power generators, offsite data storage and multiple layers of back up protection are some possible components of an effective recovery plan for a call center.

Uninterrupted Call Answering Service

The second type of planning an answering service should have in place related to disasters concerns ongoing call answering services. If a natural or man-made disaster occurs, a sound disaster recovery plan will ensure your patients’ and staff members’ calls continue to be answered.

A guarantee of uninterrupted call answering in the event of a disaster relies on technologies such as redundant phone lines, including phone access by satellite, land lines and wireless connections. Pre-arranged partnerships with separate agencies may be set up for service recovery.

If you’re paying for medical call answering services, it’s important that you know what will happen if a disaster occurs at your practice or on site at the call center. Disaster planning should be part of the service you pay for, but ask to be sure sound policies are in place.

Does your business have a disaster recovery plan? If so, what features does it cover? For example, how does your disaster recovery plan handle incoming calls? Who is going to update the answering machine messages in the event of some sort of natural disaster or weather emergency? What if the building is destroyed?

There are so many things that can be forgotten in even the best disaster recovery plan, but there is one easy solution where client communication is concerned, and that is to work with a medical answering service with a pre-existing set of disaster recovery features in place.

What would these include? The finer services have full-featured answering plans that would allow the office to remain open for communication even if some sort of catastrophe has occurred in the actual building. Fire, flood, or any other problem would not prevent patients from dialing into the regular office number and getting a live operator who can give them the details they need, forward them to the physicians, or even get them in touch with a nurse triage service too.

Naturally, if an office is in an area where some sort of emergency exists, it is totally possible that the answering service that they rely upon is as well. A good service will also have plans for backup electrical power and all kinds of “redundant” or multiple phone lines that ensure that service will be available even if lines are down throughout the region. They will also have alternate locations spread across an entire region or even the entire country, and which can step in and take over if the original facility is suffering under the same emergency conditions. Finally, the emergency services might also provide a medical practice with an offsite location where all electronic records can be kept in complete privacy, but also in complete physical security and legal compliance as well.