Avoid These Mistakes while Choosing a Medical Answering Service

The team which handles the administrative tasks at a medical/dental clinic may often find itself overburdened if the work isn’t being managed well. After all, managing calls, appointments, documentation and completing other tasks at once isn’t a walk in the park. But, it is important to realise that an exhausted team may not be able to provide the best services to prospective and existing patients. Hence, choosing quality over quantity is the best way out in order to attend to patients’ queries efficiently. Also, this may increase the chances of turning more number of leads into tangible benefits for your medical organisation.

Keeping all these factors in mind, signing up for a medical answering service will not only help you manage daily work overload more efficiently, but will also help bring down the cost that goes into hiring employees to handle calls. However, it is advised to keep a few mistakes at bay as these may bring down your customer service standard and affect your business in an undesired manner. Read here:

Working with an under-qualified staff: There might be a few medical answering service providers who do not employ trained staff. ‘Trained’ here does not only mean polished communicative and written skills and telephonic etiquettes, but it also includes the knowledge about medical vertical. Therefore, it is better to choose reputed answering service providers, for e.g., Business Connections, to ensure that only well-trained and experienced staff handles your account.

Not paying attention to compliance measures: A good medical answering service is always approved and certified by an acclaimed review body, preferably at both state and national level. You should always choose services that either hire employees who comply with the terms and conditions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or at least train them accordingly later. HIPAA compliance is key service parameters to hire employees who will ensure that information classified under non-disclosure policies remains confidential.

Not checking data management system: Not paying attention to the data management system being used by your service provider may put your entire business at risk. A medical answering service provider should ideally have both on-site as well as off-site data backup locations. This prevents loss of data that may happen in a case of power failure or system crash. Further, in the case of any emergency, your work-flow will not get affected if data has been secured as it should be.

Getting trapped in the outsource-cycle: Many times, the medical answering service you choose to work with outsources further, which in turn leaves you at a point where you cannot interfere much and adopt quality control measures. Choose an answering service which does not outsource your work to at-home agents. Sometimes, this may result in your clients ending up hearing hear unwanted background sounds this may make your medical service look unprofessional to them a picture. Hence, go for an answering service that has a trained in-house team to handle its clients’ calls.

Have you overlooked any of the points mentioned above?

I am Kea Jones a Content Curator, New York based columnist who love to write about various buzz and current affairs in business world. Besides that I am also writting reviews for various new local business houses, products and services.