Healthcare practices and clinics have a lot of back-end administrative tasks that they need to do on a regular basis. Without a large back-end staff, it can be difficult for these offices to keep their operations running smoothly. Medical office answering services can help these practices get organized and save time on their administrative tasks.
Scheduling Appointments
When patients schedule appointments in your office, they want to know that they’ll be able to see their doctor or other health care professional on time. This helps keep your practice running efficiently and improves patient satisfaction. When patients forget or cancel their appointments, it can cost you a lot of money and cause inefficiencies. A medical answering service can help you save money on this by reminding patients of their upcoming appointments and even rescheduling them for you.
Nurse Triage
If a caller is experiencing a medical emergency or other health issue, they need immediate and accurate answers from someone who understands their concerns and can provide them with website the appropriate treatment. A medical answering service can help your office meet these needs by employing a nurse triage team to answer calls and recommend treatment.
A good medical answering service can also help you streamline your patient data and avoid errors. Many medical practices are busy with patient care and don’t have time to track their call data throughout the day. This can make it difficult to find out what information is needed for a specific case or to identify patterns that may indicate a problem.
Having a virtual receptionist or answering service for your practice is an ideal solution. These specialists can take incoming calls, direct them to the correct department or person, patch or warm transfer them, and more. They can also handle a wide range of other tasks to help your office run more effectively.
Incoming Calls & Customer Service
When your patients are calling, they don’t always speak English or Spanish. That’s why having a medical answering service that has bilingual receptionists is essential. These agents can answer the questions of your patients in their native language and support them if they need an interpreter or have trouble understanding what you say on the phone.
These services can also reduce a lot of the stress that patients have about calling in, and make them feel more comfortable on the phone with a representative who can help them. This can help you maintain a better relationship with your patients and prevent them from leaving your practice for another healthcare provider.
No-Shows and Missed Appointments
A medical office answering service can help you decrease the number of no-shows that occur in your practice. With appointments often scheduled months in advance, a no-show can cost you a lot of money and lead to wasted time for your staff. To minimize this, a medical answering service can call your patients the day before their appointment to remind them of it and let them know if they can cancel if they need to.