Does Your Medical Practice Need a Medical Answering Service?
Has your medical practice taken off? Too busy to answer all of your calls?
Give your receptionist a break and hire a medical answering service. Let their live agents take the calls that you would have otherwise missed. Following are a list of reasons why hiring a medical answering service may or may not work for you.
One con to hiring a medical answering service in replace of the standard voicemail system is that it adds a third party to the string of message relaying. With voicemail, you receive the message immediately and straight from the caller and then you can return it immediately back. When using an answering service, the caller must first talk to the service agent. Then the agent calls the doctor. And lastly, the doctor returns the call back to the patient. This is seen as an unnecessary additional step.
There are medical answering services out there that do more than just take a message. They are known as automated medical receptionists. These systems are automated and run on voice command recognition. Unfortunately, because this is an automated program, the computer is not able to take the type of verbatim message that a live person, such as a receptionist, could take. On the converse, automated systems have been designed to alert the patient in the event of an emergency as well as do the work of your receptionist. These services can contact your patients and set and remind appointments. Automated and answering services are a great backup system.
Automated medical answering services are capable of doing many things at once. More so than a live receptionist. A live receptionist can only speak to one patient at a time whereas an automated system can speak to multiple patients at once. While it is scheduling an appointment with one patient, the program can remind another patient of an upcoming appointment. This becomes quite efficient and cost effective.
Unlike a live receptionist, an automated receptionist is available at all times. It also eliminates the interferences of human nature such as the receptionist’s mood or energy level. With an automated receptionist, you are always guaranteed a pleasant voice to answer your calls. Your patients will always experience a pleasant demeanor and professional attitude.
There are many things to consider when contemplating replacing a live receptionist with an automated medical answering service. You must look at a live person’s personality, moods, dependability, and professionalism versus a computerized and impersonal response. Cost is also a factor to consider. The bottom line in a medical practice is to make sure your patients are getting the proper response and treatment
The live version is still better. In the field of medical service, there is no substitute for the human touch in communication.
hi,
I like the idea about this automated medical answering service. But one question arises to my mind is that what would be the cost of this service.
In my clinic I have a receptionist who takes all the calls for me plus she also take care of the patients that come to my clinic.
Are these automated medical service used or it just a new system still not used in practice.
Help me out!
I really am not into automatic service which have been explained in this site.
But the idea behind is looking promising. It has its pros and cons just like manual labor. But we will have to think twice before even considering this service as manual service is much more better than that of automated!
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Automated systems is good to help medical staff. I believe the systems use a good artificial intelligence algorithm as the engine. However, human touch is still the best. Can the system provide option to contact the “human receptionist”?
Receptionist is better than automated answering service.
At clinic you have keep atleast one receptionist to take care of patients .and she can also keep track of appoints by phone.
This is the first time I have heard about this idea, and I think it is a great idea. I think one problem with the service might be that the consumer will not like it. They may need something urgent and it may take a while to get through to where they want to go.
I think trying it would be a great idea, though.
I believe that we are not advanced enough to change live people with computers. They need electricity, it is possible they might have serious bugs that can, in the end, even kill a patient (wrong medicines etc.). If I would have Medical Answering Service I would stick with real people.
I am a doctor by profession but i don’t think that these automated services can do what a human can. Many a times we face such cases in which a medical answering services can’t do anything. They can only be taken cared through experience.
I would recommend using the medical answering services of telephone answering service. They do a wonderful job!
How much cost for the wonderful job they take from us?however why I feel disagree with that?people need real medical attention from people who can diagnostic the case of the patient illness
only good thing I can see from the automate system is telling patient in what line number is they can visit with the doctor
in this case patient is priority,automated service only add stress to them when the answer they got from the doctor at 5pm is exactly the same at the 5 am