Owning a medical facility means having quite a few responsibilities on you that can directly affect the health and wellbeing of patients. A wrong decision could have detrimental effects, so you must make each choice carefully. For example, you need to provide some type of system to handle calls when patients dial the phone after hours.

A medical answering service will ensure that your patients will always get a live voice, even if they make the call at three in the morning. Often, people want only to hear a real person when they call. An answering machine will leave them feeling alone and even afraid if they aren’t feeling well. Choosing the right medical answering service can seem impossible if you don’t know what to look for. To easily make the decision, you need to look for certain qualities, traits, and services offered by a company.

In Country Call Centers

It is actually quite important to choose a medical answering service with call centers in the country. When patients call your office, they will not feel comfortable speaking to someone who has a strong accent and is obviously located in another country. However, some of the subpar companies do locate their call centers out of the country in an attempt to save money.

You must think of your patients first. They need to feel at ease and comfortable when they call your office after hours.

Reliable Message Delivery

Obviously, one of the most important parts of a medical answering service will be message delivery. When patients call your facility after hours or on holidays, they need to get messages to you. The proper company will offer reliable methods of delivering those messages to you. Top quality centers will provide you a selection of delivery services, like:

• Email
• Telephone
• Text
• Fax

This way, you can rest assured that you will always get your messages.

Trained Operators

You can’t choose a generic answering service to handle calls for your medical facility or you could actually be violating laws or patient privacy. Instead, you have to choose a medical answering service specifically. That’s because the operators at the service have to be properly trained to handle medical information. They still can’t diagnose or answer medical questions, but they will know how to keep information private. Before choosing any service, ensure that all operators have been HIPAA certified.

Emergency Preparedness

When you select an answering service, you need to know that they will always be available to your patients no matter what. That means they need to take steps to ensure they are always online. Some of the ways a proper medical answering service will make sure this happens includes:

• Backup telephone lines
• Call centers in multiple locations
• On site power supplies and generators

Backups are extremely important. Don’t choose any call center that doesn’t use any type of disaster preparedness system in case of emergencies.

Customized Options

Every medical facility is different and that means each location needs a different set of answering services. You may not have the same needs as another facility. This means you need to choose a call center that will tailor their services to suit your needs.

There are certain qualities that do make up a professional medical answering service. You do have so many different responsibilities on you since you make decisions for your facility. To make your choices easier, you simply need to look for the right call center based on the traits above.

Image source by medicine.yale.edu
Written by Kurt Duncan. Kurt Duncan is the Director of Operations of MedConnectUSA.com. MedConnectUSA is a leading medical answering service and has been serving the healthcare industry since 1991.