Healthcare Call Center

For businesses and mobile individuals that experience high message volumes, unified communications can be an essential business tool. There are special challenges (e.g., more stringent privacy and security standards, legacy systems) to UC in healthcare. For a detailed discussion of these, I suggest reading the IT Business Edge article, Great Promise -- and Great Challenges of Unified Communication for Health Care.

Smaller practices are in a better position to adopt UC as they typically are not encumbered by expensive legacy systems. 

Automated answering services increase control over messages by offering a library of greetings, notification rules, voicemail boxes, call forwarding and so forth.  What's more, physicians are in control of when and how they receive their messages as well. They can pick up their messages as they arrive, not when a call center decides to send over their messages. 

When a patient calls in, there is no disgruntled, exhausted call center employee to take down her message. Instead, her call is immediately answered and a custom greeting created by the practice is played. She then is guided through a simple menu that helps determine the reason for the call and separate the messages that can wait till morning and the calls that require immediate attention.  She can even tag the message as urgent.  Calls that require immediate attention can be automatically forwarded to the on-call physician.  The on-call physician can answer or let it go to voicemail - or choose to have all calls go straight to voicemail. 

The physician can pick up his messages through his phone or online from his office computer.  He can consult medical references before responding. His response is on his terms. The recorded voice message can easily be replayed, shared and saved in the patient's file.

It's simple and efficient. 

Just about everyone owns a cell phone and has an email address these days.  These new technologies have markedly changed how most people communicate today.  Patients expect greater convenience and they're used to self-service features such as ATMs, check in kiosks at airports, online banking and more.  It's certainly time to consider how your practice can start or enhance its use of technology to provide greater convenience and better service to your patients.

Just think about it.  Does your patient really want to spend more than 20 seconds on hold?  Moreover, do you want your patient spending more than 20 seconds on hold?  Do you want patients getting a busy signal when they phone your office? Is your staff too busy to spend much time with patients?  Technology makes it possible to avoid these situations.

As a patient, it is nice to be able to phone your doctor day or night and know that you will get a message to them.  Sure you could use a live answering service, but how confident are you that they'll treat your patients with the respect and compassion that they deserve on every call and that they'll get the message to your on-call physician in an accurate and timely manner?  A quick response to an urgent after hours call increases patient satisfaction and shows that you really care about your patient's health.

It may be time for you consider an automated healthcare call center because this type of service can:

1. screen calls
2. send new message notifications to an on-call doctor right away
3. let your practice quickly and easily change the on-call doctor without relying on someone at a live answering service to make the change
4. eliminates inaccurate transcription problems that you have with a live answering service
5. organize your messages by creating different voicemail boxes

A virtual office phone answering service also helps doctors make their patients feel safe and secure as the messages are recorded and conveyed correctly to the doctor. Technology enables automated answering services to provide greater convenience and reliability than live answering services and this technology is affordable for practices of all sizes. 

“The ER is the last place a member should go for non-emergency care,” says Laborers’ Health & Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA) Labor Co-Chairman Armand E. Sabitoni. “The cost is high and, often, overcrowding causes service to be slow and quality of care to drop.”

An estimated 40% - 50% of people who visit the emergency room were experiencing minor medical problems.  These patients would have been better served by a doctor’s office or urgent care center, but they went to ER because of its accessibility.   

Each year about 112.7 million emergency room visits occur in the United States. The Emergency Department Summary of the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey provided the following statistics for the the U.S., in 2006:

• Number of ER visits: 119.2 million
• Number of ER visits per 100 persons: 40.5
• Most common diagnoses: injury, poison
• Percent of ER visits with the patient seen in fewer than 15 minutes: 22%
• Median time spent in the emergency department: 2.6 hours

Visits to the emergency room should be reserved for situations where immediate care is needed to prevent disability or death.  The crowded emergency room is not a pleasant or inexpensive place for patients to wind up.  

Being accessible after hours allows your patients to receive better care and improves their health and well-being. While a live answering service or healthcare call center can answer after hours calls and take messages, the service might fail to forward important calls to the on-call physician. A good automated answering service (i.e., virtual medical receptionist) can answer patient calls and forward only clinical calls to the on-call physician.  This type of service helps keep patients safe by offering the fastest way to reach the on-call physician and by delivering the accurate messages that are free from transcription errors.