The Role of Answering Services in Healthcare Practices
Your healthcare practice takes phone calls all day — and when the call volume becomes unmanageable, patients are left on hold. When it’s harder for your patients to schedule an appointment, they’re less likely to make one. Call answering services are the solution. Improve appointment setting, enhance communication and boost cost efficiency while reducing strain on your team.
What Are Medical Answering Services?
Answering services are a way for your healthcare office to manage high call volumes. In working with a call answering service provider, you allow a team of agents to answer your phone calls and handle immediate patient interactions. Your team creates custom scripts and workflows, so the agents know how to handle the different types of calls you receive.
Professional call agents can complete many tasks, including:
Call answering services can be an excellent addition to medical offices because of the important role the phone lines play. Patients typically use the phone to schedule appointments and connect with their doctors. These processes are essential for improving care outcomes, which is often a priority for medical offices. When your phone lines are too busy to manage, patient care declines as a result. Call answering services make it easier for your team to keep up with patient needs without overextending your team.
How Healthcare Answering Services Support Your Practice
In healthcare, answering services deliver a range of benefits for your team and your patients.
Enhance Patient Communication
Patient communication is vital for delivering high-quality care. Whether scheduling appointments or following up on lab work results, patients need an easy way to reach your office and get in touch with their care providers. Call answering makes it easy with agents readily available to answer the phones.
Rather than leaving a voicemail message and hoping for a call back, your patients get to interact with a person and take the next steps to speak with their doctor. Call agents can transfer calls to care providers when they’re available, schedule appointments with integrated calendars and take detailed messages that care providers can easily access.
Call agents can also personalize interactions with patients to ensure continuity between conversations. Agents might reference previous appointments, recent prescription refills and other relevant details for a single patient. When acting as virtual receptionists, call agents become an extension of your team with branded greetings.
Streamline Appointment Setting
Your patients need to make appointments to receive care. With a medical call answering service, you have a dedicated team to take those quick calls and add patients to the calendar.
Balancing appointment setting with other administrative responsibilities at your office can be a challenge, and it might lead to missed calls. Answering services ensure your office answers every call, every time, while your team can focus on other tasks, like billing and organizing patient information.
The right call answering service will integrate with your existing calendar applications to streamline communications between the agent and your patients. This integration also makes it easy for agents to add appointments directly to a provider’s schedule. This scheduling efficiency takes the burden off your team’s shoulders and improves the overall patient experience.
Provide After-Hours Support
Medical needs can arise at any time. When someone is available to answer the phone at all hours, patients get the support they need the moment they need it. A medical answering service can operate 24/7 to take next steps for your patient.
In some cases, this after-hours support makes it easier for patients to schedule appointments at a time that works for their schedule. While your medical office might be closed by 4:30 p.m., professional call agents can schedule an appointment well into the evening, on the weekends and during holidays.
Other times, 24/7 call answering can connect patients to emergency care. Call agents can transfer calls to the appropriate parties or direct callers to the nearest emergency room when a situation requires immediate attention. You can provide custom directives for your call agents to respond to different types of urgent scenarios to help your patients in the best way.
Ensure HIPAA Compliance
It is your responsibility to protect sensitive patient information, even over the phone. A healthcare call answering service aligns with HIPAA compliance requirements to ensure patient information remains private.
One of the most important aspects of HIPAA compliance over the phone is confirming patient identity before delivering any health information. Call agents can ask the right questions to get this information, including full legal name and date of birth, and confirm a patient’s identity.
Data security is also essential for HIPAA compliance. The HIPAA Security Rule dictates that electronic information may not be disclosed to unauthorized persons, which includes cybercriminals. The right answering service will have strong encryption practices in place to ensure all electronic health record (EHR) information remains private.
Achieve Cost Efficiency
Medical offices are businesses, and cost efficiency is valuable to your organization’s success. When the number of calls increases, your first inclination may be to hire more staff, like a receptionist. However, between onboarding costs, payroll expenses and benefits, a new hire may be out of budget.
Working with an answering service is a cost-effective way to handle high call volumes. Virtual receptionists provide a similar level of support with a flat monthly rate, making costs more manageable and predictable.
Increase Patient Satisfaction
Patient satisfaction is a high-value metric in healthcare as it often correlates with retention. The more patients you have, the more successful your organization is — but unhappy patients may look elsewhere for care.
Medical answering services can improve patient satisfaction in several areas. Timely call answering alone can make a huge difference. Rather than having to call back multiple times hoping to get a person on the other end, your patients can interact with someone within a few rings. The ease of appointment setting — and the ability to call at any hour — can also make patients happier. More satisfied patients help create a positive reputation for your organization.
Choose AnswerHero™ for Answering Services in Healthcare
AnswerHero™ offers 100% bilingual call answering services with a team of highly trained call agents. With our flexible, no-contract plans, your organization can reap the benefits of an answering service at a scale that works for you. Our HIPAA-compliant practices keep patient data private, while our user-friendly web portal integrates with your calendar application to make appointment setting simple.
Get in touch with our team today to get started with our 24/7 call answering.