The Right Answering Service for Your Medical Practice

An answering service is that service that handles both the incoming and outgoing business communications. These communications may include; answering phone calls, replying to emails or text messages, transferring calls or even making appointments. In short, an answering service offers customer service.

WHAT TO CONSIDER;

Adherence to HIPAA

HIPAA is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. The best answering service for a medical practice is the one that complies with the HIPAA. This is because it’s crucial for health information to be guarded when using the answering service. The HIPAA ensures the protection of patient’s health information. In case of any issue with the breach of health information, the doctor is held liable even if the answering service is the cause. Therefore it’s very critical that when choosing an answering service for medical practice select the one that completely and truly complies with HIPAA.  Here is what you need to know about HIPAA.

24 Hour answering service

An answering service for medical practice should have 24/hour coverage. 24/hour coverage ensures that patients can always keep in touch at any time. it also enables patients to call in case of an emergency and get help, or in case they wish to cancel appointments or if they wish to seek clarification on any prescriptions given earlier on.

Scheduling of appointments

Choose an answering service that has the appointment scheduling feature. This feature should be able to make appointments, change appointments or even cancel an appointment. It should also be able to offer reminders on any appointments which help in reducing cases of patients scheduled for appointments not showing up. Such answering service helps in increasing the efficiency in the scheduling of the appointments process.

Nurse Triage Component

A nurse triage service involves the sorting of patients so as to determine the order of treatment in regards to urgency. Having an answering service that includes the nurse triage service ensures that you offer high-quality healthcare support to your patients. This is possible whereby the answering service gets all the information that the nurse triage requires and then transfers it to the triage service via a secure portal. This feature ensures that at all times the patient can pass their health information without repeating them when they come for treatments or appointments.

Medical practices are very critical in the sense that they deal with the health and lives of human beings. This fact makes it very important to choose an answering service that will ensure quality services to the patients.