How to Maintain Compliance in Your Doctor Answering Service?

The answering service industry has emerged as a viable and pragmatic choice for the medical facilities looking to streamline their practices. Using this service, the patients with emergency health conditions can find proper health at any time. Call handling through a professional approach has become a strong tool for this sector. It serves the doctors and patients at the same time using an organized method. It is no wonder that they have become an indispensable part of the industry in the recent past. However, there can be certain risks entailed in this process if it is implemented without a proper management.

These services can be customized according to the individual needs of the hospitals and medical institutions. They support the doctors through an efficient and administrative control of their calls, appointments, and messages, especially during the after-hours. When these services fail to comply with the legal requirements of the industry, some legal hassles may emerge in this system. You can avoid these issues by selecting a reliable company when looking for doctor answering services. Here are the main factors to be considered:

HIPAA Compliant:

There are some regulations laid down by HIPAA or Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. These requirements should be met by every service provider of doctor answering services. Therefore, you should always prefer choosing a company working with HIPAA-trained operators. This is important to ensure compliance with the guidelines laid down for patient data management in a medical facility. It also requires encryption of data in a set format irrespective of the form in which it is received.

Customized Call Protocols:

Mostly, the medical practitioners prefer working with some predefined protocols for managing the calls received during the after-hours. These protocols are followed by the service providers offering medical answering services. When looking for doctor answering services, prefer a company that can customize the call handling procedure according to these protocols. Basically, they require collection of basic information from the callers to make an accurate assessment of patient’s conditions. This helps in ensuring more efficiency in the handling of urgent calls during the odd hours.

Round the Clock Availability:

The doctor answering services are entrusted with a crucial task of handling the urgent patients calls in a timely manner. They use automated prescreening methods that are implemented by a live agent who answers these calls. This system reduces the costs and enhances the speed of service delivery. When a patient is routed to a live agent, it is mandatory for the agent to stay present for answering the call with an assurance for a speedy action.

Scheduled Recording:

The regulations are specifically laid down for recording the schedule of on-duty doctors in the medical facilities having a large number of medical practitioners on their roll. With this feature, it becomes easy to manage the calls and relay them to the doctors who are available at a particular time to handle the emergencies.

This service is designed to ensure administrative and timely management of the patient calls. With proper compliance, you can avoid the legal hassles as well.

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