subject: The Difference Between a Nurse Telephone Triage and an Answering Service [print this page] The Difference Between a Nurse Telephone Triage and an Answering Service
Answering services are call centers that take calls from customers after your office has closed for the day or when you're otherwise not available. These services work for a wide array of businesses, but for the purpose of this article we'll be specifically discussing medical answering services. These services take calls directed to your office when you're unavailable to answer in the same way most services do, but differ in a key way. Instead of the operators who take your client's call being trained only to answer general questions, medical answering services have operators that deal specifically with calls intended for medical businesses, and whom therefore have proper HIPAA training and experience dealing with medically related calls.
A nurse telephone triage is similar in the fact that they take calls for your business when you are not available, but differ from medical answering services in many important ways. The primary difference is that a nurse telephone triage is to answer calls about urgent health concerns and needs. The operators for these businesses are highly trained in determining the callers health complications without physical examination and are able to then refer the caller to emergency medical services as needed, or provide health information to the caller. They also may suggest the needed follow-ups with you, their doctor, for their specific health concern.
While a nurse telephone triage is great in many ways, it's not altogether necessary for most medical businesses. The care provided by these services are highly specialized and seek to aid patients who need help after office hours. However, if you run a regular family doctor's clinic or dentist's office, this level of specialization may not be needed. Often, all that is needed is for appointments to be made or for basic questions regarding office hours or address to be answered - urgent medical needs are rarely attended to by regular physicians, and are instead directed to emergency medical clinics.
A nurse telephone triage is specifically meant for urgent client concerns regarding health, while a medical answering service instead provides basic health information along with help to callers seeking more basic information like address and office hours. Overall, nurse telephone triages are far more expensive than medical answering services, and should be used only when absolutely necessary because of this. While they are excellent for emergency medical services, a typical physicians office will save tons of money while receiving the service they need from any typical medical answering service.
