This How Your Patients Benefit from Doctor’s Answering Service
Doctor’s answering service is a popular third-party service that has become a necessary addition to your healthcare practice if you want to make profits and offer quality care to your patrons. Over the years, the service has evolved by leaps and bounds and reached a point where it aims at providing not just exceptional service but a delightful experience.
That is the reason many doctors and healthcare business owners expand their operations and outsource their non-activities to the medical answering service providers. The agents on the other end of the call are expert professionals who have been trained in your business processes and soft skills to give accurate information and help you meet the customer care needs adequately.
Here are some ways how the patients benefit when you hire medical answering services to supplement your practice.
Enhanced patient satisfaction
When you are in a healthcare business, you must offer fast and timely service to your patients. Additionally, you also have to maintain quality and round-the-clock availability to cater to medical emergencies. Your patients are the main beneficiaries of your service. If you don’t have patients, there would be no reason to work as a doctor. Keep this in mind when you are making business-related decisions. Patient satisfaction is the be-all-and-end-all of a successful practice. Therefore, you need to provide 24-hour assistance, seven days a week to be able to meet all their medical needs.
Working with a medical answering service helps you expand your hours of operation to 24/7 availability without incurring the additional infrastructural expenses. In fact, doctors answering service cost is nothing compared to the business growth that you will experience as a result!
Offer personalized service
The last thing a frantic patient wants is to be tossed out by the integrated voice response (IVR). A medical answering service provider will ensure that the caller is immediately patched to the next available agent and reduce the hold time. It can also help you provide more humanized and personalized service when they call. Automation may save a lot of money but it will also cost you your clients in the long run. Give your patients the assurance that they will always reliable care just a phone call away, when they need it the most!
Make patient communication better
As a healthcare service provider, you may not be a stranger to hospital consumer assessment of healthcare providers and systems (HCAHPS) survey that tries to answer 21-point patient care questions to know more about their healthcare experience. It takes into account key topics and includes more than thirty questions.
Even though it is every doctor or hospital’s ethical responsibility to provide highest quality of care to its patient care, not everyone is in this for their patients’ wellbeing. That is why medical reimbursements are now tied into the HCAHPS scores, making it necessary for hospitals to do their best in providing the best services.
That being said, working with trained medical answering service providers will help you make each caller feel special. At the same time, these agents are also equipped to handle every emergency call in line with the medical procedure. This level of visibility and transparency in communication helps you and your patient communicate better, thereby, strengthening your relationship with your patrons.
Become a trusted healthcare service provider
Apart from scoring high in the HCAHPS survey, there are many online medical review sites where patients can leave a detailed review about their experience with you. These sites play a huge role in helping you retain your existing customers and acquiring new ones. If your patient perceives you as a reliable provider of healthcare, then they would be more than happy to leave you glorious review that will help you attract new customers.
As a healthcare service provider, you should do your best to make them trust you and speak positively about you. These perceptions are not just limited to the care you provide but also their experiences with your staff on the phone or the waiting rooms. So, be sure to cover all your bases, in terms of external factors, that can influence their opinion about you.
A professional answering service provider will handle all your calls with utmost professionalism. They will also empathize and humanize their experience when they engage with your patients. A well-handled call may help you earn that five star review and their loyal patronage that goes way beyond any other acknowledgment.
Hiring a doctors’ answering service to handle non-core tasks of your healthcare practice will not only allow you to provide better care but also equip you to focus more on your core competencies, such as providing quality healthcare and business expansion. The fact that your customers also get exceptional service is an added bonus!