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.
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