When medical practices are contemplating using an answering service they may have several questions. It is important to get all the facts about medical telephone answering service to know what benefits they provide. This helps doctors and physicians to make an informed decision about the service that they want to use.
- Live Operators Do Not Equal More Effective Service – many medical physicians might erroneously believe that they have to use a live operator type of answering service to prevent their patients from just pressing the “emergency” button to get through to the doctor. However, when automated calling systems are set up properly they are much more effective at triaging calls to ensure that only the ones that are truly an emergency go through to the on call doctor. When live operators are used there is often the emotional element that can sway them to contact the on call doctor even when it is not an emergency. Or they may be so afraid of not putting through a call that is important that they err too far on the side of caution and put through a great number of non-important calls. Using an automated service takes the guess work out and ensures that on call doctors only get paged when it is truly an emergency situation.
- Automated Service Helps Patients – many doctors may be under the impression that their patients prefer to talk to a live person when they call after hours. This is not exactly the case though. Patients do not want to talk to a live person, they want to talk to their doctor. Speaking to an operator who has no medical knowledge is not comforting to patients who call after hours. An automated service allows patients to leave their message for their doctor directly. Patients prefer knowing that their doctor will get their message immediately when it is an emergency without having to wait for the live operator to call the doctor and rely the message.
- Doctors Get the Message from the Source – automated answering services provide the information to the doctors directly from the patients themselves. This alleviates any errors in transmitting the messages. Doctors can be assured that they will get the full and complete message every time. This helps the doctors make an informed decision on what action they will take based on accurate information given in its entirety.
