An answering service is a key component for any service provider today. As with any business, a healthcare provider needs to be available to its patients during all hours of the day and night. While this is impossible for the doctor alone, even with the help of a receptionist, it’s imperative that patients can contact you or your office any time for medical advice. So what can you expect from a health care answering service? Here are a few vital points to note:
Medical Knowledge:
When running a healthcare facility, it’s important to have your customer representatives trained with appropriate medical knowledge in order to adequately respond to patients’ queries. In case of an actual emergency, the representative can prioritize the patient and get much-needed help to them. Having HIPAA certified or equivalently trained customer representatives are a must for every healthcare provider since the training includes medical knowledge and patient handling.
Availability and Accuracy:
The whole point of having a healthcare answering service is that the response from a medical office is prompt and helpful. So, the service needs to have an established system by which all the details about each patient can be captured and conveyed accurately to the doctor for his recommendation to follow-up. The system must be linked to the healthcare provider’s appointment scheduling, monitoring of prescriptions, and medical history for future references and quick response.
Courtesy:
Answering curtly causes patients to become unhappy with the service provided by the facility. So, it’s important that customer representatives are trained well enough to respond gently and courteously to callers despite the volume or length of calls received.
Handling Other Requests:
In some cases, callers may ask for a call-back, they may be in an emergency situation, or require clarifications about medications. In these scenarios, the representatives should be trained, and adequately equipped with the software to respond to all such requests as well.
Multi-Lingual Response:
Sometimes, it is essential to have an option for callers to choose the desired language of communication. In these cases, one or more representatives need to be proficient in more than one language so that calls requesting a particular language may be transferred specifically to them.
Affordability:
An answering service may be great but if the pricing is out of the business’ budget, it does no good. That’s why the best answering service will provide viable and competent packages to suit your business needs.
At the end of the day, an answering service needs to function efficiently as a bridge between the callers and the healthcare facility for creating a sense of seamless communication that’s essential to providing excellent healthcare and also gaining overall customer satisfaction of the healthcare being provided. So, these are the services that you should expect from them.
