subject: Cut Costs With A Physician Answering Service [print this page] In addition to ensuring that you provide excellent patient care, you have to worry about the operating costs of your medical facility. While there are some factors that are out of your control, such as rent for the building and other costs, there are many that are within your control. With the help of a physician answering service, you can begin cutting costs without cutting back on patient care or staffing. How does this work?
A Look at a Common Medical Office
A medical office is staffed by different types of professionals. Youll have nurses, at least one doctor and other people working in the office. To the casual inspection, all of those individuals should be working toward providing care for the patients seated in the waiting room. However, theres more to it the office has to deal with billing, with recordkeeping and more. In fact, just answering the phones is often a fulltime job, and creates a significant amount of extra cost for the average office. Whats more is that many of those calls are non-emergency calls.
How a Physician Answering Service Helps
So, how can an answering service help here? The answer is that this type of service can help reduce the volume of calls your staff deals with by a significant amount. Imagine if your staff never had to deal with a non-emergency call again. How much time would that save? How much faster would you be able to handle your patients? How much less overtime would you have to pay?
The way the system works is pretty simple. A patient calls in to the office. Their call is answered by an automated system, which gives them several options. They can choose to leave a message, find additional information or speak with an operator. The system also gives patients a way to rate the urgency of their phone call urgent calls will be sent to your office, while non-emergency phone calls are dealt with by a live operator or through the automated system. That can alleviate an immense number of phone calls, while ensuring those of the highest priority come through.
If you have been paying attention, you should be able to clearly see how using this type of answering service can help you start cutting costs in your office, while still ensuring that every patient receives the best care possible and the answers they need to questions.
