The idea sounds great but you have to weigh the costs and benefits to see if having a back up receptionist is worth it for you. To help your homework, here is a list of benifits for using virtual receptionist:

• An appointment reminder service will down patient no-shows, therefore increase business income.
• The fact that it is 100% maintenance free. You actually don’t have to install or maintain anything since the virtual receptionist is an online program.
• Virtual receptionist service is at a fraction of the cost of hiring extra staff for your front office. Virtual receptionist works 24/7 and will not require any benefit or compensation you normally have to pay to your employee.
• When you can use a virtual receptionist for trivial repetitive task, you staff can focus their time on more important task such as patient care and medical billing.
• Quicker response time for patients calling in or going online to schedule their next medical appointment. Better service will lead to positive word-of-mouth and attract more patients to your office.
• You offer more option for patients to schedule their appointments 24/7.

While virtual receptionist has gradually become common to the medical practices around the country, you’ll find it the best business decision you ever made to “hire” a virtual receptionist. Such a new hire will bring your office to a higher level of professionalism. In fact, ss more and more offices add the virtual receptionist to their employee list, you will simply risk your competitiveness by not having one.

So have you looked into a back up, or virtual, assistant? Imagine an online program that can answer your phones, provide an appointment reminder service and schedule appointments, or even forward emergency calls to the doctor. If your front desk receptionist is busy, this service will answer multiple phone calls at once and sort calls so real people can handle more urgent calls. This is open to patients 24/7 so they are not restricted by your office business hours.

I’m a small business owner and many aspects of running a business interest me, plus I know about keeping costs down. To run your business successfully, you have to weigh the cost and benefit of each service or product you invest in. Sometimes, though, spending a little money on a monthly service that’s a big help will actually save money and time. There are some tasks that I, as the owner, don’t want to spend a lot of time on. I want to handle the issues that really need my attention.

That’s why an automated backup receptionist is a great investment. It’ll save time while you don’t have to go through the hiring process to find another employee that needs medical insurance, lunch breaks or vacation time.

Having an online virtual medical or dental assistant doesn’t require you to install expensive equipment at your office. Because such service is often packaged and connected with online appointment scheduler, it offers another self-service option to your patients and saving even more time.

Some medical practices suffer under staffing only during busy times. Hiring more receptionists or nurses is not a good business solution for their short-term temporary problem. i.e. When your office is flooded during cold season, a slow front desk poses serious business problem. Imagine your patient at front desk is a toddler with a fever of 105, and your receptionist can not attend his need as she is busy on the phone making an appointment. As a provider, you can avoid that situation and save time for yourself, your staff, and your patients with a virtual assistant.

I’m lucky because a close friend is a nurse and she’s a great help when I need a little advice. I usually call her with a question or two before going to the doctor, that way I know if I need to go or not. And she can help with some things by recommending a cold medicine or telling me what to avoid. She loves helping her family and friends that way because she’s so happy to be a nurse – she earned her degree and has been working in a medical office for two years now.

She tells me about her work sometimes when she helps someone feel better or meets an interesting person. But there’s a downside to working in a medical office that I didn’t think about. The one of the front desk receptionists puts people through to talk to her on the phone about their medical problems. Well, that’s what they’re supposed to tell her. Many go on to share their life story or some other problem, or go into way too much detail that she doesn’t need to help with their medical issue. It’s very time consuming. She has to do other tasks while listening to them.

She told me about one such conversation that lasted half an hour, and I vaguely remembered hearing about an automated system that takes calls like that. It separates out the calls so patients can make an appointment without having to talk to the front desk, or ask for medical help. It sends emergency calls right to the doctor.

Now my friend doesn’t even work at the front desk – she’s a nurse. But she still gets bogged down in calls sometimes. I’m sure the front desk receptionists do as well. There’s some calls that they need to take, but I’m thinking this service will cut down on those calls. Some people want to get in and out, taking care of their business such as making an appointment or talking to their doctor. Thinking about my friend, it’d give her more time to help patients in the clinic that need her. That, in turn, will speed up appointments so patients aren’t waiting so long. At the front desk, people can use the automated system, or receptionist, to take care of routine things while more urgent calls go through. It’d hopefully weed out those long calls my friend complains about so she could deal with patients who need live advice.

These services also offer an online appointment scheduler so people can make their appointments online or over the phone. Either way makes it easier and helps the medical staff. After I talk to my friend about having an automatic medical receptionist, she’ll probably want to recommend it to her office. I wouldn’t mind having the extra options at my doctor’s office either.

I searched around to see what features are offered and found out this online or automated (through the phone) program can really help out in a medical office. Actually, it’d be like having several assistants answering the phone because the program can talk to several patients at once. And it looks like this medical receptionist is always there at your front desk to answer the phone when the staff is busy or the office is closed. That part sounds good – everyone hates being on hold. The virtual receptionist can handle all those calls and sort out the emergency calls too.

So what else can this receptionist do? One big thing is to make those reminder calls. It’d be a better use of time to have this making those calls instead of your office staff that could be helping patients in the office, or taking more important calls. This would actually help the office and patients. I like getting a reminder for appointments, but it’s nice if it’s a computer that I can hang up on if I’m busy. I receive the call and remember, “Oh, yeah, that’s tomorrow.” And then I don’t need to stay on the line if I’m busy.

This reminder service probably cuts down on missed appointments, which should make the office happier! But it’s good for patients too. Don’t you have having to make another appointment because you’ve been busy and didn’t see it on the calendar?

Better yet, this receptionist can make appointments for patients. So they can call in and get through to something right away instead of waiting for someone to have time. That’s another great feature that makes it easier for patients to schedule their appointment. And if it’s easier to schedule, they’re more likely to make one. It can also pull patients to your office if they know you offer different options for making appointments and getting through when you need help.

Incorporating something new like this usually involves a lot of cost, but this really sounds like it’ll save money by being several employees at once and speeding up several different processes in the office. Since the office can help more patients at a time, with less employees, that’s going to make this an easy financial decision. If the benefits far outweigh the cost, it’s a good idea. And having a virtual receptionist sounds like a great idea since it helps your medical office and patients. I’m for that.

Sometimes I’ve gone through the menu only to learn the office isn’t open for a few more minutes or they’re out to lunch for an hour. My schedule doesn’t always allow me time to sit on hold or wait for the office to open. It can even be a factor in deciding on my primary care physician if I have a choice of several offices.

I wish I could use the phone menu to schedule an appointment when I have the time. Wouldn’t it be great to have access to 24/7 appointment scheduling? After all, I can call in my prescription refills using an automatic system. That makes it easy to do since I can do it at six in the morning or midnight, when the house is quiet and I have time. It’s a great solution that makes patients like me happy and frees up time in the office too.

Imagine how happy it would make patients to if appointment scheduling could be so easy and convenient. Or better yet, what if you can offer them one more option: online appointment scheduling? That way, they can see all the information they need and make their appointment as quickly as they can type. That’s how I’d like to make my appointments. This would be even quicker and fit with people’s preferences. Everyone goes online to look up movie times, order items, and now many are scheduling all their appointments online. It gives them 24/7 self-service appointment scheduling.

I’m listing many reasons why I’d love online scheduling, but a medical office benefits from it as well. (So yes, make my day and get online scheduling! I’ll be happier when I come in.) With an online appointment scheduler service working for you, not only are patients more content but employees are free to speak to patients about medical issues. They’ll have time for other tasks instead of scheduling patient appointments.

And this is far superior to an answering service that takes information and pages a doctor. That’s just more waiting and answering services can’t make appointments. These days, if a person can handle something on their own, in their own time, they like to do just that. In the past people wanted to speak to an actual person, and that’s still the case sometimes, but some things are just easier and quicker to do yourself. With online scheduling, a person can even make their appointment on their laptop in a busy restaurant. It saves time for everyone if patients can make their own appointments. I know it’ll make me happier to have another task I can do online.