Medical Practice 101 - Automated Medical Office Receptionist Is Everyone's Good Friend

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Medical Practice 101 - Automated Medical Office Receptionist Is Everyone's Good Friend - By: Andy Press, Posted on: 2008-02-29

If you run a medical practice, you know that an automated medical office receptionist can be everyone's good friend!

She can be good helper to doctors as a low-cost backup receptionist that works 24/7. She can be well-liked by patients as they no-longer hit voice mail box or being put on hold. Medical office staff will also be happy to have her onboard as she relieves them from trivial, repetitive tasks such as making reminder calls and making patient appointments.

Patients are under enough stress with their problems or fears without having to hold on waiting for a busy receptionist to come back to them. From being interesting, that music rapidly gets irritating and stressful: not good for a doctor's practice. How often does your practice miss calls because your telephone lines are busy? You might have several lines or just the one; there will always be a time when an important call cannot get through to you.

It might be a call for emergency treatment from one of your favored patients, or simply a call for an appointment from a potential patient recommended to you by someone else. In either case, it would not be good for you if they could not get through. You can lose you money because of it.

How about in the evening, or at night? You might have an answer service, but would it not be better if that was personalized to your practice, and any really urgent calls filtered through to you? If you were a patient, would you like to be put on hold when you had to make an urgent appointment, or even worse, had a condition that needed urgent treatment? As a doctor even, would you like your patients to be put on hold or have to speak to a voice mail and leave a message, putting them under even more stress hoping that you will call back?

An automated medical receptionist will handle all of these situations without affecting your normal reception arrangements. Such services are designed to be the backup to your usual receptionist, and cut in only when the caller cannot get an immediate answer: on busy, no answer or voice mail message. Your automated backup receptionist handles the call while your regular receptionist is away from the desk or after hours.

From the point of view of the patient, they will love it to be was passed over to such a service if they called their doctor and got a busy message, or had been on hold for two or three minutes. That is a long time when you stop and look at the second hand going around a clock face! If I was calling to cancel and reschedule an appointment, and I had to wait too long, I would just put the phone down and not show for the appointment.

How much money do you lose monthly for no shows? It can be a major cost for some doctors. With an automated system, you cut down the number of no shows dramatically because the system automatically contacts everybody with an appointment to remind them of it. They can no longer 'forget' for you have given them a reminder the day or so before - you choose when.

There are automated medical receptionists such as ANGELA that require no hardware or software be installed in your office. You pay monthly fees to have all of your appointment problems handled offline, and you can save a fortune by slashing no-show costs. Not only that but language is not a problem: reminder calls can be made in one of a number of different languages chosen by the software based on the profile of your patient.

Automated medical receptionist such as ANGELA can separate emergency from non-emergency calls, and connect them to contacts designated by you. They can also handle multiple calls simultaneously, so that your 'busy' problems are no more. It is much more cost effective than registering for a human external service, and much more efficient. It will do exactly what you want of it.

In fact, an automated backup medical receptionist is in some aspects better than a real one since she is tireless, works 24/7 and 100% maintenance free. She reduces your business cost, increase your practice revenue by helping keep your patient happier and by letting your staff focus their valuable time on more important tasks such as medical billing and patient care.

Article Source: http://proarticles.net

This article is number eight in a series By Andy Press about Medical Receptionist, Answing Service and Online Scheduling. Additional resources and articles written by Andy Press related to Medical Practices Efficiency are accessible on line.