Healthcare Answering Service—Understanding People Oriented Facts
Unlike answering services engaged in selling products or providing product related information, healthcare answering service has a much more important role to play! Here, the person calling is not a prospective customer seeking to buy your product or services and should not be treated like one ever! A medical answering service would be dealing with patients. Patients who might have called in for an urgent medical query or those who seeking immediate treatment for an emergency health condition that needs prompt attention!
Therefore, the difference between an unattended call and a proficiently addressed one could actually end up being the distinguishing factor between life and death! Therefore, apart from checking upon the technical modalities of a medical answering service, it would also be essential for you to check upon some people oriented facts for ensuring that your medical answering service performs desirably.
Healthcare Answering Service—Some Points to take note of
- First and foremost, you need to ensure that the waiting time for your callers isn’t all that long. If a patient is in the midst of a true emergency and is seeking help desperately, he would surely not appreciate a wait longer than 5 to 7 minutes. While it is perfectly understandable that the answering service would need some time to divert the call to the specific department or the doctor the patient wishes to speak to, the caller would never appreciate a wait above 10 minutes. Remember, the basic purpose of having an answering service in place is to make sure that your patients feel special and cared for. In case the waiting time is too long, he or she may end up disconnecting the call in complete frustration!
- Second, always make sure that the responses generated by the healthcare answering service are warm, friendly and assuring. Since medical answering services would majorly cater to patients dealing with sickness or pain, a cold mechanical response on the other side when they call in could make them feel even worse! Therefore, the first point of contact with the patient must be polite and warm. The representative must be able to establish a human connect with the caller expressing genuine concerns and providing solutions promptly.
- Believe it or not, patients always expect doctors to be available round the clock. How illogical or impossible it may seem to you as a service provider, you need to ensure that at least primary care can be provided round the clock. Therefore, if you have a doctor’s answering service that caters to medical emergencies, also make sure that you have doctors available to cater to urgent requirements and health-related queries almost immediately. In most cases, a call back promise would not work!
Basically, a healthcare answering service is set up in place in order to make your patients feel special and taken care of at all times. However, when planned inadequately, the same service can end up disappointing your clients grossly. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to have all your services in the right place before you can actually make the service operational.
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