4 Reasons Concierge Medical Practices Need Answering Services More Than Ever

Medical answering service professional scheduling an appointment

Modern medical models often include cold, generic visits with doctors that last for just a few minutes, followed up with treatments dictated by insurance companies. That’s why you chose to open a concierge medical practice. Your patients deserve better than the new standard, they deserve the attention and careful thought of a professional like you for medical issues that may be quite complicated.

Those patients need you more than you may realize, but you have to have more help to free you up to take on such a demand on your time. A bigger telephone answering staff isn’t the answer simply because you have neither budget nor space for one more body in the office.

Answering Services for Concierge Medical Practices

When your practice was still small, it wasn’t that big of a deal for someone in the office to handle the phone when it rang. Today, though, it’s a totally different story. As more people hear about the benefits of concierge medical practices, more people call and more new patients appear in your lobby. This is great, but it’s also incredibly stressful for your staff. And really, to your patients, too. But you can reduce the stress on everyone by adding an answering service to your team.

There are a lot of benefits to having professional telephone operators from a medical answering service act as an extension of your practice, these are just a few:

    • Helping to keep your in-office focus on the patient. When your people aren’t always having to stop to answer the phone, they can focus on your patients and their care. After all, that’s why patients are coming to you. They want to have as much face time as possible. An answering service can help with that.
    • Maintaining the doctor-patient connection even when you can’t be there to answer the call. Sometimes your patients call to ask questions or give you additional information during the day, but you can’t always get to the phone right away. When that happens, your answering service can take the overflow call and reassure the patient that you’ll call them back soon.
  • Encouraging the patient to call whenever they need to. The best answering services offer 24/7 call handling. This is great for doctors, especially when patients have questions about medications or symptoms after the office closes.

    You can provide the answering service with basic information to help triage callers or simply answer their basic questions. Then they can either forward the call to you or log the call for you to return in the morning.
  • Freeing everyone from appointment setting. Appointment scheduling can be a really intense part of the practice. So much so that it should really belong to a dedicated team. That’s why it’s great that answering services often have appointment setting tools that can do the job in real-time. They use the same software you do, so every change, cancellation and new appointment appears instantly!

Concierge medical practices are giving patients their voices back in a way that transcends the limitations of insurance coverage. But to be a truly effective concierge practice, yours needs to find more ways to spread your time and staff efficiently. Hiring a doctor answering service is a great place to start!

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