If you are running a medical office, you need to rely on the answering services to handle patient calls regularly. The answering service provider should be equipped with the latest technological tools. They help in providing faster and more efficient patient care services. With technological advancement, it becomes easier to handle the calls for appointments scheduling or medical emergencies. Here are the tools that you should look for:
Answering Service Web Portal:
This is the most important element of a technologically advanced answering service. The company should provide a secure web portal that allows easy access to manage information related to your medical office. This web portal must have an extended validation certificate to verify that it is managed by a legal business. You have sensitive patient-related data stored on this portal.
Therefore, you should ensure proper encryption for security of your portal. If any message with sensitive PHI is leaked without your knowledge, your practice may be affected and penalized for breach of HIPAA regulations. Apart from security, the portal should be easy to update whenever you need to change the information.
HIPAA-Compliant Text Messaging:
With the changing technology, text messaging has become important for any medical answering service. It helps to streamline customer services through technology that allows messages to be sent via text. The service provider should provide encrypted messaging options along with email, fax, and phone services. They should be compliant with regulations specified by HIPAA and PHI. The services should be easy to use by your staff. Also, it should be possible to message multiple people at a time.
Online Patient Call Recording:
In a medical service, patients experience matters the most. It helps in improving your services consistently based on the feedback provided by your patients. This can be facilitated by the recordings of calls made by the patients. You should regularly verify and assess the quality of your medical answering service by listening to the patient call recordings. The service provider should follow your instructions while handling the calls and also provide the recordings as a proof of their high-quality services.
Electronic Health Records:
A well-organized medical office requires comprehensible health records for each patient. At the same time, these records should be available on real-time basis for their assessment. You should prefer hiring a company that provides thorough patient electronic health records or EHRs. These records contain detailed information about physicians who were contacted for emergencies and their average time of response to the callers.
On-Call Scheduling Software:
The schedule of medical practitioners may keep on changing quite often. Therefore, you need high technology on-call scheduling software where you can update these changes even on the go. This will help in avoiding any mismanagement of calls during emergencies.
With these technological tools, you can improve your patient services by several notches.
