Intelligent Medical Answering Services Improve Patient Care

HIPAA compliance should absolutely be at the top of your list of must-haves when you’re searching for medical answering services, but you’ll also want your next answering service to be an intelligent one.

Intelligent medical answering services create more opportunities for better patient care after-hours and result in less discomfort or harm to patients who are waiting for answers. In today’s climate, there are so many reasons to choose an intelligent medical answering service for your practice.

What an Intelligent Medical Answering Service Offers

Building an intelligent medical answering service means starting from the ground up and doing it differently.

Instead of relying on computer front-ends or poorly trained low-level employees, intelligent systems are patient-centric. They’re designed at every step to make the patient feel comfortable and safe and heard.

From the moment the patient picks up the phone, the answering service is already anticipating the call. In one ring, the patient can be connected to a medical professional who has the skills to quickly triage each caller based on symptoms and reasons for calling. The caller is then transferred to the appropriate doctor for medical advice right when they need it. Intelligent medical answering services triage callers in trouble ahead of callers who can wait, when necessary, so that worse cases can be handled first.

In a more standard system, you risk your callers being forced to wait for several rings for a person (or even being diverted to a computer-driven voice menu system). Those operators are standard phone operators who do little more than take a message and pass it along. For the patient, this kind of system is very inefficient and incredibly frustrating. They may find themselves waiting a very long time for help because the doctor on call has no idea about the severity of their issue.

Increase Your Patient Satisfaction with Intelligence

For the best client service, you should be looking for a patient-centered intelligent medical answering service. Patient satisfaction is vital to your practice; in fact, a 2014 American Express survey found that consumers in general are more likely to do business with a new provider 42 percent of the time if they’ve been given a recommendation by a friend or family member. The same survey found that a dissatisfied customer tells an average of 21 people about their experience.

The Future of Medical Answering Services

Even if you’re providing the very best patient care possible in the office, you can’t offer a complete medical service without the help of a high quality medical answering service. Adding intelligence into the mix, with a smart triage to get care to patients who need it first, will improve the caller experience, as well as the care level. With an intelligent answering service on your team, you can rest assured that your patient care is the very best it can be, even when it’s not your turn to be on call.

Intelligent medical answering services are moving the medical answering service experience into the future, for doctors and patients alike. The additional training and tools necessary to make these systems work are what separate the good medical answering services from the great ones.

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