By Colton Eva
You dedicate countless hours of your time to care for patients during the week, but your work never stops once the doors are locked at night. After regular business hours and on the weekends, your patients turn to their phones for medical questions and sometimes emergencies. You take the calls when possible and the rest are left on voicemail until an employee can respond during operating hours. You want to find the balance between having time to decompress while still providing your patients with a personal touch and excellent experience. Sometimes, this can be too much for you and your staff to manage. Luckily, you never have to choose between the number of patients to help and the service quality level. By hiring a doctor after hours answering service you can manage all calls and options outside of standard business hours.
Keep reading to see why an answering service can improve your practice:
One: Cost Savings
Time is money and every minute your employees spend on the phone is a minute that could be devoted to a more critical patient or business tasks. You could hire additional staff to ease the call volume, but this will become incredibly expensive. Instead, hiring a doctor after hours answering service will help answer the calls received outside of business hours to ease the volumes during the day.
Two: Improve Patient Satisfaction
A physician after hours answering service will create a more satisfying patient experience with efficient operations to help decrease wait times during phone calls and appointments. Patients can reach your practice at any time to get answers or medical assistance. Your physicians will only need to address the most crucial calls.
Three: Keep Records
When managing sensitive patient information, it is crucial to keep the practice safe. Therefore, all calls made through the after hours answering service are time-stamped and recorded, thus providing accurate records when necessary.
Four: Lower Waiting Times
Your patients lead busy lives, and your practice is also busy. Although you would love to be able to answer every call, your patients are typically put on hold. A medical after hours answering service can filter and redirect the calls to a call center so patients can speak to a live operator quickly.
Five: Personal Time Protection
For physicians, after hours is a much-needed time to relax, recover, and reconnect with family and friends. Unfortunately, the timing of medical issues can never be controlled so physicians must handle these issues during their free time. A doctor after hours answering service will allow patients to speak with trained health professionals outside of normal hours so you can relax during time off.
A doctor after hours answering service can be of major assistance to your practice, thus lowering call volumes while still answering patient’s questions. Best of all, your practice will save money and maintain a high level of quality service to keep your patients satisfied!
