When you have more than one physician using a medical facility, office, or clinic, you need to choose an answering service for doctors office phones that can keep up with the rotation of doctors and ensure the right physician is called.
With many medical and healthcare offices, the natural choice may initially seem to be a call center, which allows you to notify the service on a daily basis as to the doctor on call. Unfortunately, this type of answering service for doctors office calls is rarely effective, and doctors quickly become unhappy with the service and incorrect calls.
Call Trees
With a virtual answering service for doctors office needs, it is very simple to set up a hierarchy or a call tree. In other words, you can stipulate the doctor on call, a secondary or even several levels of calls to place. This means that if the doctor on call doesn’t answer the emergency service notification within a specific time, the system automatically begins dialing the next number on the tree.
For patients, this provides a level of service that is very professional. Even if the doctor on call doesn’t respond within a few seconds to minutes, the next doctor in the practice will get the message.
This is also a great benefit for the doctor on call. Sometimes things do happen, such as traveling through a “dead zone” or simply missing a call. In these instances, the second doctor, and on down the line, will be contacted immediately by the system.
Highly Confidential
As a patient with a medical emergency or a person just wanting basic information, having the ability to not just leave a message but determine how the message will be handled is a big plus.
Since patients are leaving their own voice message, they understand that the what they leave will be heard only by the medical professional. This is very different than the traditional options for an answering service for doctors office calls where the patient has to talk to a call center staff member.
It is interesting to note that not only is this much easier to keep in full HIPPA compliance, but it also reduces the number of emergency calls to on-call doctors. Patients, when given the choice to self-select from emergency or non-emergency calls, are much more accurate when reporting to virtual answering service for doctors’ office system than with live and non-medically trained operators.
At No More Phone Tag, we have created an answering service for doctors offices and clinics that is just what patients need.
