Medical offices and clinics sign up with Apello for a variety of reasons. One of them is a high rate of abandoned calls. Needless to say that call abandonment is not a good thing in a medical setting. To avoid it, medical providers may turn to a medical answering service like ours.
Call abandonment is a scenario in which a caller hangs up before either reaching an agent or completing the intended task for which they called. A perfect example would be a caller who sits on hold for 10 minutes but ultimately hangs up in frustration.
Not a Good Situation in Healthcare
Abandoned phone calls are not good in any industry. However, they can be especially problematic in healthcare given the nature of many of the calls. As a medical answering service, there are five key reasons we want to help clients avoid call abandonment:
- Patient Needs – At the top of the list are patients and their needs. A patient could be facing a potentially life-threatening situation without even knowing it. That person is simply calling in for some quick advice. But without access to a doctor or nurse practitioner, there could be serious consequences.
- Provider Liability – Abandoned calls could mean urgent messages are never taken and patient needs are never met. Down the road, this could mean liability issues for the medical provider. Providers don’t need any more liability.
- Patient Satisfaction – Patient satisfaction is also a critical component. Patients are customers, and dissatisfied customers go elsewhere. A high call abandonment rate is one way to send patients looking for new providers.
- Office Inefficiencies – A high call abandonment rate indicates certain inefficiencies within the office. Moreover, abandoned calls can make an office even more inefficient by requiring staff to return phone calls that should have been handled when they first came in.
- Lost Revenue – Abandoned calls translate into seeking care elsewhere when a patient’s needs are urgent. This suggests that a high abandonment rate is depriving a practice of significant revenue.
Letting calls go unanswered is frustrating enough to patients. But being able to make a connection only to have to abandon the call out of frustration or lack of time only makes an unhappy patient even more so. It’s not a good situation. Medical practices should do everything they can to avoid it.
Addressing Call Abandonment
Our position at Apello is this: the best way to address a high call abandonment rate is to partner with a medical answering service. The modern answering service can do more than just take messages after hours and on weekends. It can fully integrate to handle both after-hours calls and supplement office staff to provide adequate coverage during regular office hours.
In the absence of a medical answering service, a provider can do some other things to minimize abandon calls:
- Adjust Staffing – A medical provider could adjust staffing to ensure maximum coverage at peak times. Implementing a flexible scheduling option could make the job easier.
- Employ Technology – Certain technologies, like call queuing, can help route calls correctly as soon as they come in. Patients are connected more quickly to the appropriate parties because they aren’t having to wait on office staff to route them.
- Callbacks – Some medical providers offer a callback option. If an agent isn’t immediately available, the caller is automatically given the option for a callback. This is a great solution for non-emergency calls.
Call abandonment is never a good thing when you’re talking medical calls. Providers with unusually high abandonment rates should seriously consider partnering with a medical answering service.
