Working in the healthcare field is extremely challenging. Your mind, body, and emotions must be continuously prepared to treat and care for patients day in and day out. This is why employing medical answering services can significantly help in the day-to-day operations of a healthcare facility.
In the medical field, when you have a busy practice, this means that many people put their trust and faith in you. That’s why the very best healthcare professionals’ performance is often measured by the number of patients they have at the clinic.
Having medical answering services can assist your clinic’s operations in more ways than you fathom. In today’s fast-paced world, having reliable medical answering services help in solving the queries of current and future patients. When you have professionals answering calls to your clinic, you can focus on giving the best care and treatment for your patients.
Choosing a Medical Answering Service
Whether you have a single or multiple physician practice, nursing facility, pharmaceutical groups, or infirmaries, there are medical answering service teams trained to provide the specific needs of your place of work.
Aside from answering calls, here are some other services that they can provide.
- Inbound calls
- Call answering, screening, dispatching
- Helpdesk services
- Scheduling appointments
- Appointment confirmation calls
- Appointment reminder calls
- Paging doctors for emergencies
- Other receptionist duties as needed
Aside from those tasks, an answering service provider can give you a daily, weekly, or monthly (or as you need them) summary of call reports. You can also be provided with the central message center to dispatch and store your messages.
HIPAA Compliant
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) publishes guidelines and standards that all medical and healthcare professionals must follow. These rules ensure that confidential and sensitive patient health information is secure.
One of the cornerstones of HIPAA is the law to protect the privacy of all patients. This law governs anyone and everyone working in the healthcare industry as well as third-party vendors they contract with. From IT contractors working with hospital computer systems accounting and billing companies to attorneys specializing in healthcare laws – everyone must be HIPAA compliant.
Before contracting with an answering service provider, make sure that they are keeping their operations fully HIPAA compliant. Answering service providers fall under the category of a contract or business associate. Thus, they must know the rules about keeping patient health information confidential.
How Medical Answering Services Help Healthcare Facilities
In today’s post, let’s look at the benefits of medical answering services teams provide to healthcare professionals. Here are some of the ways they can offer you assistance:
Provide Real-Time Answers
As a healthcare professional, you’re always busy. As much as you want to attend to the needs of everyone all at once, that is not something realistic you can do. An answering services team trained to handle medical-related calls can provide real-time assistance to callers with immediate needs.
Having a team to help you provide real-time answers to callers will prove to be a big help – both to you and to the patients.
Assessing the Needs of the Patients
Answering services teams can help you evaluate and sort out the medical needs of your patients. Every one of your patients will come to you for different healthcare needs; two patients will rarely have the same exact medical history, condition, and treatment needs.
However, even with these differences, all patients’ requirements can always be sorted out and categorized into different groups and factors – your availability, medical advice, schedule, and more. This setup is something medical answering services are trained to do. This benefits you and your patients.
Promotes Advocacy and Establishes Trust
When a current or potential patient reaches out to your clinic, they expect their concerns to be attended to right away.
If they call and can’t reach a live person to speak with, that doesn’t look good for your practice.
A speedy response will make your patients your patients feel valued and given importance. Also, you ensure that you’re giving immediate response to any urgent health concerns they may have.
Bilingual Medical Answering Services
Many answering services providers will have bilingual agents in their team. This feature means you wouldn’t need to find a translator when you need one. Your bilingual answering services team is available to help you and your patients.