5 Disadvantages of Not using Answering services in your Medical Office

An in-house answering team is prone to violating a patient’s health information. Medical offices have to comply with HIPAA regulations with stringent regulations regarding protection of patients. It might seem cheap to have your staff handle patients’ information but it puts your office at risk of failure to comply with HIPAA standards.

Professional answering agencies have strategies and appropriate equipment to ensure the success of your medical office. The ideal answering agency will have a secure messaging system limiting the transmission of patient information over email, text, or voicemail. Additionally, the answering agency should have a secure online portal for checking your messages.

Medical data security breaches

Relying on unprofessional people to handle medical data comes with a risk of security breaches. This comes with costly repercussions. Switching from paper to paperless records is a wonderful thing but it increases the risk of data breaches when left in the hands of nonprofessionals. Medical offices have a mandate to protect patients’ information all the time. A professional doctors answering service will have a secure infrastructure to ensure all medical data is safe and secure.

This is through strategies including not allowing answering agents to use their cellphones or writing at the work stations. Areas with medical data servers need keys or passcodes to restrict entry. To prevent computer-related data security breaches, firewalls on agent computers are necessary to prevent access by outside computers. Tracking and assessing user logins and passwords allows determining culprits for any problems. Additionally, answering services ensure a security policy extending to PCI DSS compliance for secure credit card and online payment options.

Wrong information

Nonprofessional staff is bound to give callers the wrong information. Giving them customer service tasks to handle might make it hard to adjust to new work regulations. These might not understand appropriate responses to FAQs and callers are likely to begin questioning the credibility of your service. Additionally, using a receptionist to respond to medical inquiries might encourage giving out wrong information for medical conditions or diagnoses.

Wrong information puts the patients’ lives in grave danger. This puts your practice at risk of lawsuits that cost a significant amount to settle and loss of business resulting from reputational damage. Answering agents understand the best way to respond to callers in the best way possible. Additionally, these agents stick to your script regarding handling customers in various situations.

Putting callers on hold for long

Patients usually look forward to speaking to someone on calling your medical office . This is important because an emergency can happen any time of day. Just like compliance with HIPAA regulations, minding about the wellbeing of patients is very important in healthcare. Patients desire to talk to a nice and friendly person who emphasizes with their problems. Your employees are likely to get overwhelmed with picking calls and handling regular tasks. Most times, patients are likely to get placed on hold while handling other callers.

This frustrating situation is likely to make the caller hang up and call another practice. Making a patient wait too long on the phone makes you liable to negligence lawsuits. An answering service limits this by ensuring a call distribution system evenly among available agents. The agency is always ready to handle calls including in periods when expecting a large volume of calls. You can always request on-demand reports to look at your call activity.

Non-specialty service

Making your employees handle calls in your practice requires costly training to get the appropriate skills. This takes time and is very inconveniencing. Neglecting appropriate training exposes patients to wrong information. An answering service offers highly trained and certified professionals to give patients appropriate information. This saves patients from wrong medical advice that might encourage lawsuits.

The ideal answering service will have agents who have ongoing training making them stick to industry standards. These will understand how to schedule appointments and forward calls to appropriate physicians. Patients get a pleasant experience on receiving appropriate and timely medical advice from your customer service .

Bottom line

Offering wonderful customer service is the trick to make your medical office a favorite. Hiring an answering service will significantly pay off by giving your customers a positive experience. Ignoring to seek professional assistance for your customer needs exposes your medical office to reputational damage. This results from violation of HIPAA regulations, offering patients wrong information, medical data security breaches. Outsourcing answering services is a proactive measure to improve your bottom line.