Today's Practice: Changing the Business of Medicine TP2018Q2DigitalEditionWeb | Page 33

10 Critical Components
Don Thaler
need to know right away if a side effect they are feeling
is an emergency allergic reaction, a mild side effect, or
something else entirely. On-demand call coverage will
route that patient’s call immediately to where it needs to
go, or get the message right away to the nurse practi-
tioner or doctor on call.
Around the clock, overflow and on demand call cover-
age from a medical answering service gives your medical
practice a chance to increase its availability to its
patients, giving them better care and resulting in signifi-
cantly higher satisfaction.
3. Easy Appointment Scheduling
The economic skeleton of the medical practice is the
appointment book. Keeping it full and well-organized
is critical to the financial health of any office. An elite
medical answering service will do both, keeping your
practice running efficiently.
Through integration with your existing scheduling
program or recommending a superior alternative, your
live support partner will provide centralized appoint-
ment scheduling and seamless adoption. They’ll follow
specific instructions for how to interact with your
unique patient mix, while collecting the necessary infor-
mation to ensure them that their health is an abolute
priority.
An elite medical answering service will also help drive
the bottom line of a practice. An industry study found
that no-show rates for appointments could be on
average as high as 30 percent. 2 A quality answering
service can meaningfully impact the number of no
shows by simply implementing industry best practices.
4. Easy Account Management
Automation in the management of your services is a
critical componewnt of any elite answering service.
When you partner with an advanced agency, this
typically means you will be set up with a secure, central-
ized dashboard that contains all the information about
individual patients, messages, documentation, analytics
“96 percent of patient complaints
have to do with customer service
rather than care.  The most
common complaint? A lack of
human communication in
customer service.”
and usage data. You should also be able to view and
edit your on-call schedule whenever necessary. This
type of tool is a full office management solution that
increases communications, accountability, and produc-
tivity.
Having everything at your fingertips will give you and
your staff the highest level of efficiency in managing
patient care. With the click of a button, you can access
a full year of messages, account notes and appointment
history, filtering by time or patient.
These account management services should provide
you with a centralized ‘back end’ look at your practice.
Real time reporting, analytics, notations and other
critical data will become commonplace when analyzing
the health of your practice.
5. Customized Plans for Better Customer Service
The best medical answering services will create a
customized plan specific to your practice needs. Every
practice is unique, but all share the same need for an
elevated patient experience. A recent Vanguard Com-
munications study found that patients’ primary
complaint about their doctors had nothing to do with
care; it was customer service.
A jointly drafted call script will undoubtably make a
significant difference in your patient communications.
With a script written to your exact specifications, each
call will be handled or routed according to the stabdard
of your practice culture. Don’t settle for less.
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