If you are operating a healthcare business, you have enough things to deal with without worrying about med answering services. However, an answering service is an essential part of your business. In fact, your service can be your best friend or your very worst enemy. When you find the right service, it is your good friend all the time.
What Are Med Answering Services?
When we talk of answering services for medical businesses we are talking about services for doctors, hospitals, clinics, ambulatory surgical centers, and many different kinds of healthcare providers. These businesses have specific needs geared toward health care and they require special services.
Enemies
Some med answering services can seem like a dream and quickly turn into a nightmare and here are some reasons why:
- One lazy staff member – it only takes one lazy person to negate a perfectly good human run medical answering service. For example, one individual is having problems at home and she decides to take it out on the rest of the world. She may be rude to patients or place them on hold until they eventually give up and hang up.
- HIPAA violations – not all med answering services are HIPAA compliant, even if they advertise they are. A faulty system or untrained workers can accidentally reveal personal health information of patients to unauthorized personnel, and this can result in significant fines from the government..
- Financial headaches – many services charge you by the call or minute and if you have a slow month, your bill might be manageable. However, when you get a lot of calls in a short period of time, your bill may be extremely large and this can put a big dent in your operating expenses.
Friend
Med answering services can be your best friend when they never charge you too much. In fact, the some of the best services charge flat rates and the amount never changes from month to month. You always know just how much this expense is going to be.
A good friend doesn’t create additional problems for your business by being rude to patients or ignoring them. This friend works tirelessly all day and all night, and can handle calls during business hours as well as after office hours.
When an urgent call comes in your friendly med answering services forwards the call to the right medical professional every time You do not have to be bothered with unimportant calls until the next business day, and you will save a great deal of time, money, and headaches.
