Benefits From An Automated Medical Receptionist When Sending Appointment Reminders by:Jim Peterson
Appointment reminders are one of the key factors in preventing patient no-shows and
they also allow to squeeze additional patient into the schedule if some of the patients decided to cancel their appointment upon the receipt of the reminder.These reminders may be sent out by your live receptionist or you can use AssistMedic to do it. The live receptionist is a very multifunctional member of the staff and in the situation of extreme multitasking might make mistakes when sending reminders: send duplicate appointment reminders to the same patients and forget to send reminders to the others. When AssistMedic is used for sending appointment reminders to the patients no such mistakes take place " all the appointment reminders are sent out according to the pre-set schedule. Thus no patient will be left behind. Reminders sent by AssistMedic also include a link allowing to cancel or reschedule the appointment so that the doctor will see the update in his schedule in case of changes. The live receptionist might be able to fail to inform the doctor about any such changes.
Did you ever think how many man-hours does your live receptionist spend to send out the appointment reminders daily? Now let's multiply this figure by the number of working days and the hourly wage of the receptionist. And this is the amount you are paying for work which can easily be automated. The receptionist will probably be very happy to the cancellation of this routine duty and will with more care accompany the old granny with a cane to the ophthalmologist office or bring the glass of pencils to the bored 5-year-old waiting for his mummy.
Working hours for the live receptionist are set and the receptionist will not stay in the office for unpaid overtimes to send out appointment reminders unless the medical practice of yours can afford a 24/7 medical receptionist taking care of everything. Whereas the automatic medical receptionist will be there to take the phone calls and send reminders not requiring any extra payments 24/7. This virtual medical receptionist will not need to be pushed or reminded of his duties " everything will be done automatically generating an automatic appointment reminders sheet. You'll be always able to check which reminders have been sent to which patients.
What is also of great importance, AssistMedic is fully HIPAA compliant which cannot always be true even about the best of the best live receptionist. No one can guarantee the conversation of the receptionist from accidental overhearing or the computer from being spied upon by a random visitor or someone from the staff.
Thus using AssistMedic to fulfill some of the live receptionist's routine duties will benefit your medical practice in numerous ways: no human errors while sending appointment reminders, no need to pay more to your receptionist man-hours, 24/7 coverage and HIPAA compliance.
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Are you planning to automate some of your the tasks handled by your medical office receptionist? Make sure you check out the AssistMedic virtual medical receptionist - it might be exactly what you need.