Many people believe the relationship between physician and patient is only limited to business hours when the physician treats patient’s illness. However, healthcare needs can strike at any time and what truly matters is your ability to offer uninterrupted service to your patients. Here is where physician answering service might prove useful. Let’s understand how your patients can benefit from telephone answering service.
Increase Patient Satisfaction
Patients are the center of healthcare. Without patients, you won’t be needed to practice medicine. Patient satisfaction is an important factor in the physician-patient relationship. Though you cannot do much for patient satisfaction after office hours, you can certainly use a phone answering service to ensure your patients get an opportunity to talk to a live person which is enough to delight or give emotional support in their dire hours of need.
Improve Patient Communication
Not everyone likes to leave messages on voicemail or interact with an answering machine. One of the key areas of healthcare that is considered while rating your medical services is patient communication. While it is mostly doctor to patient or nurse to patient communication, a telephone answering service can play an important role in post-discharge scenarios. For example, the telephone answering service can answer patients’ questions pertaining to a medication or any general post medical care related questions.
Take Appointments Anytime
For a Physician keeping appointment calendar full is important to maintain productivity and maximize revenue generation. Your staff can take appointments during office hours but what about patients who call after office hours.
The telephone answering service can be of great help as it can take your customer calls 24×7 and allow patients to take appointments anytime. With secured access to your online scheduling program, the CSR working at telephone answering service can set appointments, change appointments, or even change appointments.
Send Appointment Reminders
Having a patient miss appointment is frustrating for physician and hospital staff. It is more likely to disturb the set routine for the day. However, patients do not miss an appointment deliberately. There can be many factors that would cause the patient to forget about the appointment taken days ago. The telephone answering service can send appointment reminders to patients to ensure there are no missed appointments. They can use any methods to communicate with a patient like calling the patient, sending a text message, or sending an email.
Five Star Patient Care
Answering calls take a lot of attention and time of your staff. The result is they are not able to fully concentrate on their duties that make patients life easier. With telephone answering service, your staff will be able to give more time and attention to patient’s needs.
Having a physician answering service can help you in after office-hours communication that can provide tangible benefits to your healthcare clients that they will truly appreciate.