In case you’re a doctor, it’s your responsibility to ensure that adequate and timely medical care is administered to patients who are in need. At the same time, an assistant is required for the regulation of appointment scheduling and ensuring the clinic runs without any issues. One of the most effective tools to ease optimize your processes is a doctor answering service.
What is a Doctor Answering Service?
A doctor answering service also called medical answering service is an IT solution that accepts messages and calls from patients and other callers who call other than the clinic’s operating hours. This service takes calls for doctor’s offices during the unavailability of office staff.
Provisions of Doctor Answering Services
There are many functions that a good physician’s answering service will perform which for sure can facilitate daily tasks and improvise patient care. Certain functions include but are not limited to:
- After-Hours Emergency Service – A doctor answering service can function as the main point of contact for your practice after hours, fielding calls and using intelligent scripting and decision trees to determine which calls need dispatch to the on-call physician and which do not.
- Patient Appointment Scheduling – In using a doctor answering service, you will give your patients the ability to book and manage their appointments anytime and anywhere through the use of web-based calendar systems. This system acts as an automated intermediary between the patient and the physician when the doctor is unavailable.
- Appointment Reminders – By sending automated reminders to patients about their upcoming appointments, a doctor answering service can greatly reduce the costs associated with missed appointments. It also helps ensure that patients receive the care they need when they need it.
- Pre-Screen Messages – Doctor answering services have the capacity to issue automated pre-screen messages to callers, which can provide them with salient information that may affect the status of their calls (e.g. a statement informing the caller that it is after the clinic’s operating hours, instructions on who to contact in the event of a life-threatening emergency). This helps ensure that the doctor-patient experience remains as professional, transparent, and seamless as possible.
- Secure Messaging – Doctor answering services secure messages sent to and received from patients by encrypting them in a secure location, thereby preventing leaks of sensitive data. The platform then stores the messages off the device which keeps the contents of messages private and unreadable, even if the device is lost or stolen. This sense of security will improve your patients’ sense of trust and confidence in your practice, and subsequently enhance your public reputation.
What Are the Benefits of Doctor Answering Services?
There are multiple benefits of using a doctor answering service such as:
- Reduced Distractions – Practices need to remain available to the patients, but many calls post-operational hours do not need to reach the call provider. Using VA.care medical call answering service in such cases helps to avoid dividing the attention by ensuring only the appropriate calls are sent off to the on-call.
- Customized Availability – Medical emergencies can arise at any time. Our team ensures that doctors are not disturbed because of non-urgent calls after hours. You can personally customize the time when you want your call service to be functional as per your structure and routine.
- Fulfilled HIPAA requirements– Many patients are sensitive towards their data and wish to keep it confidential. Our HIPAA-trained team implements digital safeguards to protect the information along with following core medical practice principles.
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