There are many different types of offices that require healthcare answering services. These can include answering systems for a doctor’s office, which may need emergency services for patients to access on-call physicians, or it may include facilities that don’t require this additional level of service.
For example, dentist’s offices, rehabilitative therapy facilities and mental health services may not require the option for emergency contact with the professionals. However, these offices can benefit from having a virtual phone system that provides patients and clients with the information they need or allows them to leave a message.
Flexibility and Options
With any of the healthcare answering services on the market, having the ability to customize and scale the system to your office or facilities needs is an important factor. Virtual systems have the advantage of being easy to not only configure but also to change.
This is an important option in a busy facility where multiple doctors may have a variety of schedules or the need to provide specific patient information. With everything recorded on the system, patients will always have the right information and there will never be confusion with a live operator mixing up issues such as office hours, medical professional schedules or other necessary information for clients and patients.
Calling Out
The best virtual healthcare answering services are not just rated as top options for being able to handle client and incoming patient calls; they are also able to effectively contact the on-call physicians and healthcare professionals.
The system, once the patient indicates an emergency, immediately notifies the on-call professional by any method indicated. This could include multiple options for redundancy such as a text message and a call to a cell or home phone.
Additionally, the physician can then, using the system, call back to the patient. The number displayed for the patient will be the clinic’s number, protecting the private phone information of the doctor on call.
With this type of medical or healthcare virtual phone service, it is also simple to build in a hierarchy of professionals to contact. This way, if the system doesn’t receive a call from the on-call physician in a set period of time, it automatically messages the next name on the list and so on. This ensures that a patient never has to wait for a return call for emergency issues, which difficult to design when using a live operator system or a typical voicemail type of program.