Much of modern business is about adding value. Even in healthcare, companies want to add value to what they offer customers as well as their own bottom lines. We are all about that here at Apello. We are fully committed to the idea of medical answering services adding value to individual practices.
How does your practice handle after-hours calls? Is your staff large enough to effectively manage a large volume of calls during the business day? Any sense that you and your team are struggling to meet the demands of your daily call load is motivation enough to look at a medical answering service.
Below are a number of ways that medical answering services add value to your practice. Some of that value is passed on to your patients. Some of it directly impacts the bottom line. Needless to say that it’s all good.
A Range of Support Services
We begin the value adding capabilities of medical answering services with support. The services companies like ours offer support practices of all sizes and scopes. Such services include things like:
- After-hours and emergency call handling
- Appointment scheduling and management
- Patient triage of urgent circumstances
- Prescription refill requests
- Basic billing and insurance inquiries
- Message taking and forwarding.
Some of our medical clients opt for only selected services while others utilize all of them. Our services can be deployed only in after-hours situations or around the clock. It’s really up to the individual practice to decide what’s most important.
Regardless, value is added by taking some of the load off practice staff. They are under less pressure because the phones don’t demand so much attention.
Enhancing Patient Relationships
Medical answering services also add value by enhancing patient relationships. If there is one thing private practice owners know all too well, it’s that the doctor-patient relationship is fragile. So it’s in a practice’s best interests to make sure those relationships stay on the right track.
Medical answering services help by:
- Reducing patient wait times.
- Increasing accessibility to healthcare providers.
- Directly addressing patient inquiries.
- Providing for greater continuity of care.
Patients able to freely communicate with their healthcare providers tend to be happier patients. Happier patients add value to a practice by continuing to use the provider’s services.
Value Adding Operational Benefits
We cannot talk about adding value without addressing the bottom line. The fact remains that healthcare is a business in this country. Every practice needs to maintain a healthy bottom line to stay in business. How do medical answering services help? Consider the following:
- Increased Efficiency – Being able to turn phone calls over to a third-party allows staff to serve patients more thoroughly and efficiently.
- Financial Savings – Contracting with a medical answering service can save money that would otherwise be spent on staffing, infrastructure, overtime, etc.
- Scalability – A medical answering service should be capable of scaling based on call volume. That means more money saved.
- Attendance – A medical answering service should offer automated patient reminders. This should improve appointment attendance rates, thus boosting revenue.
Fairness dictates acknowledging that a medical answering service is not a one-stop solution to improve a struggling practice. But it can be one tool among many for adding much needed value to a private or group practice.
If your practice is struggling under a heavy volume of inbound calls, consider contacting Apello as soon as you can. Our services can add value to your practice, value that is both patient-facing and internal. A live answering service could help you get things back on track so that your team can better serve patients.
