Physician offices are understaffed, underpaid from managed care organizations, and overwhelmed by the medical and social needs of the patients they serve. Many physicians feel “chained” to their practice and work long hours each day. Sickness and illness occur twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and often can not wait until the office opens. Physicians and patients alike rely on phone answering service to receive calls from patients and relay messages to the on call physician. A quality phone answering service performs this function seamlessly, integrating itself into the workflow of each physician office that it serves. Unfortunately, affordability of these services is often a prohibitive factor as well as the human error that can occur when an phone answering service is used.

Common physician complaints about live answering services include:

1. Messages from the service are relayed to the wrong physician on call, sometimes repeatedly waking up this person throughout the night
2. Patient names are not transcribed correctly
3. Answering service staff are not well versed in medical terminology therefore incorrectly relaying chief complaints or presenting symptoms
4. Calls are not triaged appropriately, with non urgent calls being lumped together with more acute calls, putting physicians more at risk for medical liability
5. Patients and physicians are kept on hold for long periods of time
6. Front office staff receive an influx of sick patient calls for appointments during the first hour of the practice being opened (the busiest time) from people referred from the answering service
7. Cost of answering message service does not equal the quality of goods provided

Besides receiving after hour calls directly and never getting a break from patient care, another cost-effective option is to invest in a 24 hour, 7 day a week virtual answering service. These services cost a fraction of what traditional answering services cost minus the human error factors mentioned above. They have the ability to separate urgent from non-urgent calls and immediately connect calls without bundling them and relaying them at specific intervals. You won’t hear patients express frustration at being on hold for too long with these services because they handle multiple calls simultaneously and can even make appointments for the patient calling in. How is that for decreasing your front office burden in the morning, particularly on a Monday and improving your overall medical practice management?

Many considerations have to be put into your selection of an answering service. These include cost, efficiency, degree of worry, and the ability to care for your patients most effectively when you can not be there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week…just in case.

Call center is one of the most frequently heard complaints by small business owners or medical practices these days. And one of the most frequently heard complaints about call centers is that you can never make yourself understood.

Whether the company you are trying to reach has made call center outsourcing to Scotland, or Mexico, or Bangalore, having a simple conversation such as making, checking or cancelling an appointment can sometimes become a real hard task. This is no reflection on the person on the other end of the telephone, as doubtless anyone would have the same problem if they worked for a foreign company whose customers were based abroad.

Even if the call center is based on home soil, there is the potential obstacle of regional dialects and accents confusing both caller and operator, or human factors such as the receptionist having a cold, or a sore throat that may make them less intelligible.

However, the fact remains that in the current financial climate, a centralised medical answering service is a viable and sensible way to save your practice money. So why not cut out the risk of your patients not being able to make themselves understood through an automated virtual receptionist?

A virtual medical receptionist uses Interactive Voice Response (IVR) software to speak to patients naturally, in their own language, and in a neutral accent. If you have used IVR in the past, you should know that speech-recognition technology has come a long way in the last few years in terms of the quality of IVR based self-service systems.

But perhaps one of the greatest advantages of a remote receptionist service is that it has back-up options.

If your patient calls a live agent call center and struggles to make themselves understood, they have little option but to get frustrated with the situation, slam the phone down and hope that when they try again – if indeed they do ever call again – they reach a different agent who might understand them better.

There is no such problem with a virtual receptionist, as they have a process to go through in the unlikely situation that your patient cannot make themselves understood.

On the rare occasion that the IVR software fails to communicate with a caller, perhaps when their medical complaint prevents them from speaking or hearing clearly, a virtual receptionist will firstly re-prompt the question and ask the caller to try and answer the question again.

If this fails, it will give the caller the option of entering the answer via the telephone keypad – something which in nearly all cases will solve the problem.

However, if for some reason they can still not get their message across, the patient will be immediately connected to a live staff person immediately.

There is even a backup to the backup.

Every call that is made to a virtual receptionist is detailed and recorded on the instant call log.

This log files all the details provided (name, phone number, time of and reason for call (i.e. emergency, appointment or voice-mail). Therefore if a patient is unable to be connected to live staff, someone can always call them back to resolve the situation.

During peak hours clients may try to call and fail to get through because the line is busy. To avert the negative effects that this brings to your business, invest in a reliable physician answering service. A good physician answering service will handle all the incoming calls with outstanding efficiency. It can handle many calls at the same time thus reducing the inconveniences of clients having to wait on the line.

In addition, good physician answering service can prioritize calls and have the urgent ones get to you without delay. This makes your services very reliable and patients will trust you to always deliver especially when they need you most. A 24/7 doctor answering service guarantees your clients attention any time of day or night at an affordable cost.

With the prevailing economic times, investing in a virtual answering machine will save your business in terms of operating costs because the service does not require any maintenance. As far as productivity is concerned, a physician answering service performs way better than a human answering service because it does not get tired. The service does not ‘sleep on the job’ and there is no need to supervise how it is working unlike with humans. This will free and save you a lot of time.

An automated doctor answering service relieves your staff of tiresome and boring tasks and enables them to engage in other more important activities. By investing in this service you will offer more personalized attention to your clients and thus building their loyalty. The clients will feel appreciated and will find no need of looking for alternative services. Well, you may ask, ‘but, I can get the same from a human answering service by hiring more staff?’

A live answering service can do but at a higher cost. Human beings cannot handle many tasks at once. Thus, your clients will have to hold on the line in case there are many incoming calls at the same time. Human beings can also be unpredictable and their reactions are influenced by the external factors around them. As much as they may try mistakes are inevitable and with the ongoing credit crunch some mistakes can prove to be very costly both now and in the distant future.

So, try out something new this time round. Find for yourself how an automated answering service can completely turn around your medical profession. As other businesses count their losses be smart and see your clientele grow. That’s one sure way of beating the credit crisis!

A virtual call answering service can help dental providers, their staffs, and patients alike. Personalized customer service is still important to most people. In an ideal scenario, a person calling a dentist office would have his or her call immediately picked up, answered, and the issue resolved. Unfortunately, humans are managing the front desk process and are therefore prone to human limitations and emotions. Good receptionists can still become overwhelmed with in-clinic patients, phone calls, and completing laborious insurance paperwork. Plus, a human can typically only handle one telephone call at a time. This means that if one receptionist is running a front desk, one caller is going to be responded to at a time.

So, what do dental patients prefer understanding the ideal scenario described above is not always feasible. Most people would suggest that an efficient response to their needs is a close substitute to personalized attention in certain circumstances. A large number of calls to a dental practice relate to appointment scheduling or questions. A virtual call answering service can respond better in many cases to the need for efficiency. Whereas humans have limitations, a top call answering service is an excellent multi-tasker. It can typically handle multiple phone calls at once and assist callers with routine tasks such as scheduling appointments.

A 24/7 medical answering service also supports the need of many dental providers to offer an after-hours answering service. For many, paying a live agent to respond to after-hours phone calls is not cost-effective. However, a virtual answering service that requires a moderate up front cost and little to no ongoing maintenance makes perfect sense as a solution to help schedule appointments and meet other needs in an after-hours dental office scenario.

Surprisingly to some patients, a virtual answering service is also more often the more efficient method for getting immediate transfer to a provider in an emergency. Dental practices may not often deal with emergencies, but tooth pains and urgent dental care does happen after hours at times. Sometimes, people simply cannot wait until the next day or next appointment time to get their problems resolved. Whereas people can be tires or irritable in assisting with emergency care calls, a virtual answering service is… well… a machine. The 24/7 medical answering service is a great support for patients of any dental practice as it helps as a backup receptionist by day, and as an after-hours answering service by night.

Holidays or no holidays, patients get sick and need to see you. You still need a medical office front desk receptionist, as well as other valued staff. Patients command attention. Appointments need to be made and tracked. Emergencies never seem to understand holidays. As the crunch comes, you have to juggle factors like who has seniority and who worked extra hours throughout the year to decide who gets what days off. All you really ever signed up for was to treat patients. This business management stuff is probably not your strong suit. I know it was new to me.

I would suggest moving to an automated medical receptionist as your answering service. This automated answering service will make appointments, answer phones, and coordinate many medical front desk issues. There are reliable remote receptionist services that can do reliably handle routine, but very important parts of your medical office operations.

Automated answering service will be any medical office’s best Helper, brought to you by modern technology!

No matter what you need to do in order to manage your office holiday vacation requests, a 24/7 back up receptionist can handle the appointment scheduling and keep your office running smoothly. You will have a virtual answering service, online appointment scheduler, automated reminder service and web-based backup technology to assist in those short staffed times. The right virtual medical office receptionist will give you the room to let your real receptionist take time. The programs work so efficiently and do so many office tasks that you may have to be reminded to schedule your medical receptionist for work after the new year!

A web-based doctor appointment scheduling service not only takes the hassle out of holiday vacation musical chairs, but it can be used all year round. Medical staff turnover is high in medical offices, especially the medical receptionist position. While you are trying to make everyone happy during the holidays, certain programs can lessen the load all year long. With mundane responsibilities taken off your medical staff’s shoulders, they are freed up to provide better patient care. Unhappy staff members project their displeasure onto patients; patients that may already be apprehensive about their care. When your staff is happy, they are better able to make patients feel welcome and important. Whether you realize it or not, patients that feel good about their care in turn, perceive you as a good doctor. While you may be the best doctor this side of Galen, patients must realize that you are a good doctor for it to matter. Happy patients mean healthier patients (and fewer lawsuits!).

When you have a medical assistant online all year, office staff can focus on patient care, the job detail that attracted them to medicine in the first place. Then by next holiday season, you will not be juggling so many schedules and maybe, just maybe, your remaining staff may not be so anxious to take time off!

A virtual medical answering service is a technology that is able to handle multiple phone calls at one time, while working with callers to set up new appointments and transferring them to providers in cases of emergency. Given the unstable nature of some of the patients that psychiatrists work with, the ability to be efficiently contacted when a patients is in dire situations is vital. Obviously, the provider does not want to sit by the phone all day. A virtual call answering service is typically more efficient than even a live receptionist at transferring emergency calls as it skips delays and interruptions.

Along with the fact that a virtual answering service requires little ongoing investment, it also does not struggle with human limitations. Psychiatrist clinics can sometimes be stressful places. Receptionists often deal with patients, phone calls, office tasks, and insurance paperwork. Juggling all of these can be stressful and exhausting. People may become irritable and inefficient when stressed or tired. The medical answering service does not face these limitations. It performs endlessly and tirelessly despite being able to take on multiple calls at once and never getting a break. Additionally, many virtual answering service solutions come equipped with a multilingual answering service capability in order to effectively respond to calls from a population that is become more and more diverse in culture and in language.

The business advantages offered by a best in class virtual call answering service are many. It is not only a good tool for use as an after-hours answering service, it can also function well as a backup receptionist. If the live receptionist is away from the desk, working with a patient, or on another line, the virtual answering service steps in to take the call. Although most people would prefer to talk to a live agent if one is readily available, they also prefer to work through a virtual answering service if it is immediate, effective, and hassle-free. It is better to let a great virtual answering service help your patients set up appointments than to make them wait on hold or face a repeated busy signal every time they call your clinic. The virtual medical answering service can improve appointment scheduling and reduce the stress for your live receptionist.

I first needed to clearly define everything that I needed in a medical appointment scheduler. Since I run a solo internal medicine practice by myself, I am always making business decisions when I should be caring for patients. One area that I particular hated was the hiring and firing of my medical reception. I firmly decided that I needed a program that provided self-service patient appointment scheduling. This way, patients could simply call me or log on and schedule a time to see me.

Since I had decided to move to a web-based doctor appointment scheduling system, I decided that a package should offer an automated appointment reminder. If patients were doing their appointment scheduling online, I should be able to have an automated reminder for those appointments. Instead of having a medical receptionist make calls, I asked myself, why not get a package that would do it automatically and without error? I could then use it for keeping track of my schedule, as well. It seemed silly to go paperless for appointment scheduling and then waste paper by printing out my list of patients at the start of every day.

As I was researching the various programs and their features, I found that the level of sophistication in these programs was pretty impressive. The larger packages make it so that I do not really need to have a front desk receptionist at all. Some programs provided the equivalent of 24/7 medical reception. Now you may think that would be impersonal but it really is ideal. Patients hardly miss a live front desk receptionist because my medical technicians greet them when it is time for their appointment and begin intake right away. Since appointment scheduling is automated, the practice runs much more smoothly, and patients are not kept waiting nearly as long as they had been in the past.

Since I was moving towards automating just about every medical receptionist duty, I decided that should probably also consolidate my physician answering service into the same program. Why pay for a live answering service when I would have to manually input patient appointments into the now online appointment scheduler?

With all of these features, I realized that I was really asking a lot from a single piece of software or a single online service. I wanted a virtual receptionist, a reminder program, a 24/7 medical answering service and 24/7 patient scheduling. I may have been able to sacrifice one of these, if I had not found them all in a single package, but I had to have a package that was secure. In order to make the move to automated appointment scheduling, the entire program of service had to be fully HIPAA compliant. Regulations have gotten extremely strict over the past five years or so and I cannot afford to have fines or lose clinic days for a violation.

Now that I had this tall order to fill, I went online and spoke to colleagues to find out the best programs available and at the best price. The programs available today are very advanced and I was able to find one that provided all of those features and did so securely. When I considered the savings in terms of personnel costs and hassle, I wish I had made the move to automated appointment scheduling sooner.

1. A good answering system will help you respond to patient queries in a timely manner and must be available 24/7. It should free you from having to depend upon live receptionists all the time. As a backup to live receptionists, you should be able to forward your business calls to your answering system on BUSY (when your line is taken), on NO-ANSWER (when you can not pick up a call), or IMMEDIATE (when you are off work or on vacation).
2. Advanced medical answering system can help you acquiring new patients even on after-hours. Some system can engage in natural language dialog with callers, plays your voice instruction giving a list of accepted insurance policy. Allows caller to reserve a new patient appointment after they have heard your instruction.
3. Many answering systems can make patient reminder call. In addition, if your see patients who speaks language other than English. You can make your reminder calls friendlier to them by using a phone reminder system that has multilingual capacity.
4. A medical answering service enables you to attend to questions and messages even when you are short-staffed. The service helps you maintain a schedule and keep your staff happy so that they can enjoy their lunchtime, breaks, sick leaves, holidays, unforeseen emergencies, etc. It frees your staff so that they can attend to matters that contribute directly to patient well-being and your clinic’s bottom line.
5. You can customize your medical answering service to reflect your specialty in the medical field – so whether you are an obstetrician, oncologist, or cardiologist you can get an answering system that reflects the significance, delicacy, and specific nature of your calls. Customizations such as managing and viewing multiple doctor schedules; defining individual appointment profiles and rules for telephone messaging, etc are also possible. You can also define the rules for managing emergency calls.
6. You can gather valuable data on a variety of issues with the help of a medical answering service that can be programmed to ask questions to callers. You can inform patients on healthcare specific to their condition. You can subtly advertise your practice and refer other physicians to the caller.
7. A medical answering service that helps you achieve HIPAA compliance in a systematic manner is a great asset. You can breathe easy about the privacy and confidentiality of patient records.
8. Physicians depend a lot upon referrals to boost their medical practice. A medical answering service keeps them in the loop about new cases even if they are not present to receive the calls themselves.
9. A virtual medical answering service that works 24 x 7 and can be deployed to do the shifts when live receptionists are not present is a great cost-saving investment. In the long term it works out cheaper than employing human receptionists. Such a service is free from the limitations regarding language and number of calls that can be handled at a time.
10. If the medical answering service offers digital recording of all phone conversations, it places you in a better position to treat patients, tackle complaints, and maybe lawsuits from irate patients as well.

Thus, for a medical practitioner, there are many positives that come out of having a medical answering service to work in conjunction with the front-end reception desk managed by live personnel.

I’ve called lots of offices and talked to several of the front desk receptionist as well as the answering services attached to the offices. Believe me; I have called every office in my area looking for just the right one.

Well, I think I have found them. I called this one office and didn’t get a live person, but I did get an automated system that was so helpful. This virtual medical office receptionist actually made an appointment for me. The voice was so friendly and caring, I had the feeling the entire office would be the same way. I actually got a telephone reminder call from the 24/7 patient scheduling system.

I went to the doctor’s appointment and talked to the staff about the electronic system they had. They absolutely love it. One of the ladies in the front office says the 24/7 medical reception system is the best there is. It frees them up to do the hands on things that are needed when the patients come into the office. She said they do answer the phone when they are free, but when patient’s need care, that need comes first and the 24/7 backup receptionist is turned on the patients can receive the best of care. The care you receive is so important to the entire staff.

I found out that the system is set up to automatically answer the phone, make appointments and take messages for the nurses. The nurses really love the system too. They are able to have the automated system make the reminder calls for them, which does cut down on patient no shows. Believe it or not, a lot of people do forget their appointments and just a little appointment reminder call, really makes a difference. And you know the more patients they see, the more money is made. Happy patients lead to a happy doctor, which leads to happy staff members.

They also told me that next time I needed an appointment; I didn’t even need to call in. I can get online, which I am very comfortable with and make my appointments for the entire family. I can even request prescriptions refills on line.

The neat thing about this new system is it can separate my emergency calls from the regular ones, so I’ll get the quick help in my time of need.

I’m thrilled with finding a local doctor that uses this great virtual receptionist system.

In an ideal world, your medical staff would be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You are well aware of the fact that this is not possible. In those moments where the staff is pre-occupied with other tasks, you need a reliable go-to service option. Look no further than a virtual answering service.

Efficiency of Automated Answering Service

At times when you or your office staff is unable to take incoming phone calls, there is the risk of patient calls being dropped. You could turn to a live agent answering service. This type of service will simply take down the message information and move on with the day. The chance of calls and messages falling through the cracks between their service and your office is high. Patients will be left wondering when or even if your office will get their messages. The end result is lost productivity as your staff scrambles to fix everything that the live agent did wrong.

With a virtual answering service in place the end result would be significantly different. As patient phone calls come in, the service would determine the nature of the call. Based on a patient’s response, the phone answering service can distinguish between needing an appointment scheduled, needing non-emergency medical service and needing immediate medical attention. Each call will then be handled accordingly. Patients can breathe easy knowing their medical needs are getting the attention they deserve.

Effectiveness of Automated Answering Service

A live agent answering service is only as good as the person answering the phone call. Outside factors such as fatigue, illness, hunger and jam packed phone lines greatly affect how incoming calls are handled. A live agent service experiencing any one of these factors can equal misplaced or mishandled telephone calls. Patients on the other end of the phone are given the cold shoulder.

On the other end of the spectrum is the virtual answering service. It is immune to human factors like fatigue and illness. Crowded phone lines are never an issue. The service is skilled in handling multiple phone lines ensuring each and every call is properly handled. This service will provide a level of reliability that has your patients feeling respected and validated. An end result such as this will instantly carry over towards the way your patients view your service, your staff and your overall medical practice image.

There is a common misconception in the medical profession that patients want a live person on the other end of a phone called placed to their doctor’s office. While this may be true in some circumstances many patients simply want the call handled efficiently and effectively. This leaves them with the peace of mind that they are a valued asset to the doctor and the medical staff. Trusting this patient aspect to a live answering service agent is risky business. In the event a call gets lost or a message gets misplaced, patients will start to feel lost in the system. Give yourself and your patients the value each deserves with a virtual answering service.

A virtual answering service can be the right choice for many business offices and particularly medical offices where appointment scheduling is the lifeblood of the practice. An answering service can relieve the stress of an overtaxed human staff and give them the peace of mind to look after the in office patients with the professionalism they deserve.

Many businesses insist that their employees always answer the phone regardless of the number of clients waiting in queue for assistance, never leaving a potential client waiting on his or her phone. Others practice the opposite theory of letting the calls go unanswered while they tend to clients/patients already in the office. Someone will always pay the price for not having a better call answering service policy in a professional office environment.

In the past, answering service technology was less than practical and full of bugs making it more frustrating for callers than anything else. Convenience over professionalism was acceptable to the public and the professional practice, however poor it was. Today the call answering tech expertise is without a doubt a vast improvement over what it once was and there are so many added features because of the internet and advances in telecommunications.

Answering services or an answering message service can now send out appointment reminders with a professional yet casual voice message that does not sound robotic but is natural. The human voice recognition software used is improving all the time, far more advanced from earlier versions. Appointment schedulers are automated so you will never lose an important call or infuriate callers.

A virtual answering service will save your business money and your current front office employees’ valuable time. Your professionalism will be enhanced by virtue of your efficient and respectful handling of all callers’ time. When you close your doors at night, you can feel good about your virtual answering service taking care of after hours callers and routing them to where they need to be. Your patient and client care needs well looked after by your answering service.

From an outside callers perspective you want to be sure your message is heard and acted on. You would like to think your call IS important to them just as the messages say they are. Your time is just as valuable to you as the professionals time is to them so you want to be treated with respect. An answering service that is quite functional, quick and concise, that continually proves its value to return callers is significant.

It would be business-savvy for any professional office to try out a demo of the automated answering services available as many offer free trials. You will always need a full time human employee to perform inner office needs, but in time, one can envision the entire reception-front desk staff being completely virtual.

Employees are costly. Additionally, some full time and part time employees require benefits. Employees are also real people with real emotions. Even good employees grow tired, have stress, and can be overwhelmed.

All of these live answering service challenges can potentially be overcome with a best in class virtual after-hours answering service. A virtual answering service use advanced technology to answer phone calls from live patients. It can effectively handle and manage appointment calls, emergency calls, and other common needs phone calls. A virtual answering service can multi-task and answer several calls at once. This means that patients will not be turned off by delays in setting up appointments in the evening. More importantly, it means that patients in an emergency do not have to wait for busy or slow live agents to connect them with a busy provider. The virtual answering service can directly connect an emergency caller to the appropriate provider.

There is more good news about the 24/7 medical answering service. Since it is an intelligent technology, the virtual medical answering service does not struggle with human emotions, stress or fatigue. It can work tirelessly, accurately, and efficiently, day or night. Though there will be a modest up front expense or a modest ongoing service fee, a virtual answering service requires very little to no ongoing maintenance. The ongoing expense and time involved in using and managing the virtual answering service is much less than it would be with a live agent.

Customer service has taken on a new meaning in today’s fast-paced and internet-driven environment. People still do appreciate a quality, personalized service experience. Sometimes, only a human can respond to the unique needs of a given customer. However, busy people also would prefer the efficiency and accuracy offered by a virtual answering service if it means they could avoid time consuming phone calls, being left on hold, being treated abruptly by a stressed employee, or the like. The virtual after-hours answering service can meet these demands of the busy person and is an essential part of operating a well-rounded customer service medical practice with costs and resource requirements that are doable from a business standpoint. The virtual answering service is also a great friend to the live agent who can focus time and attention on more demanding patient needs and completing laborious insurance paperwork and filings.

If you are a medical practitioner, whether established or still growing you need to be aware of the real benefits that a virtual assistant can offer you. If you are planning to invest in an online receptionist service then you should be aware of the features to look for.

1. Compare virtual receptionist products and services for cost and feature benefits. Basic features to look for include scheduling, canceling, and conforming appointments; reminder calls; call transfers; new patient registration; 24 X 7 availability; and maintenance support by the company. Cost of course is a basic consideration and you should evaluate services based on fee requirements; hidden costs, if any; and any hardware or software installations to be done on your part.
2. Check the success rate in handling calls. Your virtual receptionist should have at least an 85% success rate in call handling. Make use of the demo services offered by the provider to get a feel about the quality of interactivity offered by the system. The virtual receptionist should be such that in the event of a communication failure the call gets transferred to a live receptionist.
3. The virtual medical receptionist that you opt for should be customizable to your specialty as a health-care service provider. It should allow you to set restrictions for the day and duration of appointment; enable the patients to set their own appointments; include any special information from the doctor to patient, when required; and the rule-based online scheduler should work in sync with the virtual receptionist.
4. The virtual receptionist should be adept at not only managing existing patient accounts but also adding new patients to your existing base of patients. Find out whether the process for registering new patients is smooth or cumbersome. Your virtual receptionist is the first point of interaction for a new patient and its imperative that the system creates a good impression of your service.
5. Data and service migration should happen smoothly without loss or corruption of data. This is an important consideration as often data migration comes at a cost of time and money. Ideally, the migration should happen right the first time itself with zero data error. It’s a great help if the virtual reception system is compatible with MS Office tools like MS Excel.
6. Consider ease of use for the patient as a top feature requirement. As in any business, retaining an existing customer is far easier than acquiring a new one and your virtual receptionist should also be able to double up as CRM tool for you. It should be able to handle multiple calls simultaneously so that patients are not put on hold; multiple language support should be present; and self-service features such as scheduling and canceling an appointment by a patient should be made available.

I also found that I was spending way too much money on a live answering service. Since I am the only physician in my practice, having a 24/7 medical answering service is critical. However, even though I was paying for a live answering service, there was no attempt made at triaging calls. Emergent calls would take just as long as prescription refills and I had to sort through them on my own. While I wish I could say that I thought of using a virtual answering service de novo, I was actually told of the program by a close friend and colleague. The software has turned out to be a boon for my practice.

Imagine having a 24/7 medical answering service that will separate the emergent calls (and forward them immediately to the correct emergency contact), from the urgent calls, from the ASAP calls, from calls that can afford to wait. Fantastic, right? This next feature was the clincher, for me. It turns out the same program will allow my patients to either call my office to make a doctor appointment or go online and use the web-based doctor appointment scheduling system. My schedule was kept online and new appointments could be made 24 hours a day. It even included an appointment reminder system to help me keep track of things during the day and week.

When I implemented the program the response that I got from patients was surprising. Almost universally, my patients were very enthused by the idea of being able to call or log on and do their appointment scheduling directly. I’m not sure why they felt like they could not do this before, but some patients said that they felt like they had access straight into my calendar. Some described the process as self-service patient appointment scheduling. Having this “power” was important to many and I think I have actually a little better patient follow-up. The other positive is that with this virtual receptionist, patients are never placed on hold, a feature that is very important to patients.

I was initially worried that calling my office would seem like calling a bank or the cable company. In actuality, the phone answering service uses a natural, interactive dialogue which closely mimics a medical receptionist. The other big issue was security. This is a web-based doctor appointment scheduling system after all and I am very strict about the safety of patient information, even demographic data. I simply would not use a program that did not fully adhere to HIPAA regulations. The program I eventually decided on was fully secure.

I now have a small group of very happy, hard-working medical technicians, a fully automated appointment scheduling system and physician answering service and I am actually saving the money!

Do you ever wonder how much business you lose because your office is closed or your staff is too busy to answer the calls? A medical answering service can pick up those calls that otherwise would have been missed or placed on hold forever. Isn’t this just what your medical practice is missing?

What a Medical Answering Service Can Do?

The days of a live agent answering service just passing along messages are comming to an end. An online virtual medical answering service now offers many more benefits in the age of modern technology. It is equipped with the ability to discern between emergency and non-emergency calls. It can immediately forward your emergency calls to any number that you specify, book appointment for your patients, and make timely appointment reminder call to them.

When a medical answering service is answered by an automated receptionist, it can perform many of the same tasks that your receptionist usually does; an automated receptionist is an additional, or back-up, receptionist working for you at a fraction of the hiring cost.

An automated medical receptionist is can engage in natural language dialog with your callers using advanced speech recognition technology. It usually has the ability to perform the following tasks:

· Talk to your patients to determine their need, forward call to emergency contact.

· Search and Set appointments that match their date and time preferances.

· Make daily appointment reminder calls

Such a multi-tasking frontdesk helper allow your staff to focus on other important tasks. For exmaple, they will have more time for patient care and medical billing.

Virtual medical answering service functions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It is extrodinarily dependable in performing routine, repetitive tasks that are not particularly enjoyed by human staff. Computers are not susceptible to the weaknesses inherent in humans like, fatigue, health issues, bad days. A medical answering service answered by an automated medical receptionist is a virtual work horse that does not tire and does not need any time off. If this sounds like something your medical practice may benefit from, then you should investigate the benefits of having a service like this. After all, with so many obvious benifits to your medical practice, what have you got to lose to try one?

Then I began work in a medium-sized practice. I still had call, though it was nothing like residency. Now it seemed that the medical answering service was my new nurse’s station. I would get all sorts of call. While they were not BUN levels (thankfully) they were never properly triaged and they did not always arrive in a timely fashion. Some emergent calls could have been handling more quickly while some routine calls could have been deflected.

When I could finally afford to move to my own practice, I just assumed I would purchase the same physician answering service as I had used previously. I never imagined that an answering service could represent such a large fraction of my overhead. When I combined this with a medical receptionist, medical technicians, a physician assistant, etc., it became difficult to justify the cost and yet I had to have an answering service.

Thankfully, as I was lamenting to a colleague she told me about software that would allow me to automate my phone answering service. I was a bit apprehensive at first but I soon realized that there are programs that are HIPAA compliant (always important) that function as a fully automated 24/7 medical answering service. As I began to look into the available products, I found that for less than I would pay a medical receptionist or a live answering service, I was able to get an automated appointment scheduler, appointment reminder system, and a 24/7 medical answering service. Moreover, this service is 24/7 online, working after hours, during lunch breaks, during coffee breaks and did not need time off for vacation.

Since I was trying to grow my solo practice, if this was going to alienate or anger patients, there is no way I would use it. I would have to break down and spend the money for a medical receptionist and a live answering service. What I found was an answering service with natural dialogue that was very easy patient-friendly. Patients could instantly arrange a time to see me right over the phone based on availability in my schedule. They did not need to talk to me or a medical receptionist and the process was faster and more reliable than the old paper appointment log.

A few programs are so sophisticated that you really do not need a front desk receptionist at all. The programs are reliable, inexpensive and can handle multiple calls simultaneously so your patients are never on hold. The major advantage of this (besides happier patients) is that emergent calls are immediately forwarded to the appropriate emergency contacts.

Before you renew or begin your contract with a live answering service, I highly recommend that you consider the various automated or virtual answering service programs. I think you will find that they are less expensive and in many ways superior to a traditional physician answering service.

There is a significant cost advantage with the best in class doctor answering service. A live agent requires labor expenses in an ongoing fashion. Full time and some part time live receptionists also receive costly benefits. Additionally, humans have emotional and physical limitations and challenges that are not present with the virtual medical answering service. People get tired and can be irritable, short, and unhelpful when fatigued. A live agent also can become stressed and overwhelmed when faced with multiple patients, phone calls, interruptions and insurance paperwork. This is why employee turnover is often fairly high in the medical industry. On the contrary, a virtual medical answering service does not wear out. It performs consistently, tirelessly, and does not complain or get short with patients.

Unlike the live agent, the virtual doctor answering service is also able to help multiple callers effectively, at once. The top call answering service can help multiple callers with appointment scheduling, emergency transfers and other basic needs at once. Without the virtual medical answering service, callers will be left on hold, get a busy signal, or be ignored when the live agent is on the line with another patient.

Most consumers today agree that a quick response from a virtual agent is a preferred alternative when the personalized services of a live agent are unavailable. Customer service today is a balance between a personalized approach to the patient and a quick response backup to protect people’s time.

All of these factors contribute to the fact that many medical practices, including doctor’s offices, optometrists, chiropractors, psychiatrists, dentists, and more are turning to the virtual call answering service when a need arises for additional call support. The virtual answering service can also be the solution to the 24/7 medical answering services that many providers are required by law to provide to patients. A live agent is often not a practical solution to the after-hours answering service because of the cost to demand ratio. In some markets, there is simply not enough demand for after-hours service to pay the labor costs for a live agent. The virtual answering service is a great low cost solution to this important legal and service requirement.

In today’s competitive healthcare environment, medical practices have to consider the same business operational issues that face other companies. Customer satisfaction and retention are necessary today. Maintaining relationships with existing patients can make or break some medical providers. It has long been thought a personalized service delivered by a live agent is the best customer service alternative. The truth is that is the case. Unfortunately, even the best live receptionist has emotional ups and downs, gets tired, is forgetful, and is overwhelmed when faced with a constant barrage of patients, phone calls and insurance paperwork. The virtual answering service is not bound buy emotional and physical limitations faced by people. The call answering service is consistent, focused, and efficient in responding to appointment and emergency calls.

Another great strength of the virtual answering service is that a best in class model can do what a human cannot – handle multiple phone calls at once. A live agent may take several minutes to respond to a call, set an appointment, offer services, or pass along the caller to an emergency contact. A virtual answering service can handle multiple calls at once, set appointments quickly, and immediately transfer emergency callers to the appropriate provider. This is a not only tremendous for business efficiency, but is actually a major strength in the new trend in customer service. Callers now expect a quick and convenient experience as an alternative to being left on hold, getting a busy signal, or being ignored. The virtual answering service is responsive, efficient, and consistent in its performance, day or night.

Want more value from the virtual call answering service? Whereas a live agent comes with labor costs, benefits, wasted time, and emotional and mental hassles, a virtual answering service comes with a moderate one time cost. The best in class medical answering service requires little to no ongoing maintenance. It works tirelessly and endlessly to perform based on the programming and standards set in place by the medical practice. The virtual agent also comes with many other added value features. Many medical providers are required to offer a 24/7 medical answering service. Small to medium sized practices cannot bear the cost of a live agent for after hours work. The after-hours answering service is a more feasible way to meet this demand. Low cost, great service and no complaints make the virtual answering service a great bargain.