If you are a physician or work at a physician’s office, you must have some kind of answering service. In addition, this type of service has special requirements, like privacy and other features. In fact, answering services for doctors are not like normal answering services, and here is why.
Standard Business Answering Services
Most business can use almost any type of answering service. For example, your local hardware or grocer only needs to provide a simple message for people calling after hours. Plus, it can provide callers with a chance to leave recorded messages. There is no sense of urgency with these businesses and someone can return the call the next day or when it is convenient. This only requires a simple and basic system with no need for special services.
Answering Services for Doctors
A physician practice is not like a standard business, and has different needs. Let’s look at what would happen if a doctor used a simple answering system:
Suppose a patient called an OB-GYN doctor at 10:00pm. Naturally, the office is closed and the woman is six months pregnant and having abdominal pains. If all she gets is an answering machine, there is no way for the doctor to contact the patient, and this could result in a serious medical emergency. This is why doctors have answering systems which allow urgent calls to get through to the physician on duty.
Which Features are Needed?
Filtering calls is one of the most important features to have. If a patient’s call is not urgent, there is no need to contact a physician right away. Here are some other important features answering services for doctors should have:
• Forwarding urgent calls – suppose the doctor is not currently available via cell phone. The service should have the capability to forward calls via text message, cell phone, or pager. This provides a good backup system for emergency contacts.
• Privacy – all patient information must be private and confidential (HIPPA compliancy).
• More than one backup contact number
• Allows the physician to talk directly to patients when needed
• Email message delivery system
• Fast notification of urgent calls – it should only take seconds for calls to transfer.
• Choice of customizing available options
What are the Best Answering Services for Doctors?
The best answering services should provide all the features listed above. In addition, you should have the option of trying the service first, for free. This lets you test drive the system to see if it can take care of your answering service needs or not.
