When we go to the doctor’s office, we expect to be treated with the utmost care. This applies both medically and professionally. We see our doctor in order to be treated, but a doctor won’t be able to effectively treat their patients if their medical office isn’t running properly. A medical office is the first point of interaction with a patient, and if something goes wrong there, it’s bound to impact the rest of the appointment.
Thankfully, there are ways to improve the performance of your medical office. A cloud VoIP phone system can boost the efficiency and productivity of your office, ultimately improving patient care. Here’s how:
Scheduling appointments and answering questions
A medical office can receive a flurry of calls throughout the day. These calls can range from making a simple appointment to a potentially serious medical emergency. You want to make sure that a patient reaches the person that can help them the most as quickly as possible. To help with this, you’ll want to be using an auto attendant. With an auto attendant, a patient will be provided with a list of options to choose from. This way, the people who have billing questions will be directed to the billing department, and the people with medical questions will be directed to the on-call nurse.
Sharing information across a multidisciplinary team
There are a wide variety of medical practitioners working at a medical office. There are family doctors, nurses, specialists, and everyone else in between. As a result, a patient will likely see multiple people during the course of one visit. They may even see and talk to different people upon each visit or phone call that they may have. In order to properly treat them, then, you’ll want to make sure that the information a patient shares with each person at the practice is also shared between everyone else. Using CRM software is one way to easily input and share information across a medical practice. Plus, by setting up software integration, you can have that information at your fingertips whenever a patient calls into your practice.
Staying up to date on a patient’s well-being
As much as we might wish it, a patient is never healthy 24/7, 365 days of the year. Even your healthiest patient is bound to have an accident eventually. And, when these days do come, you want to make their well-being is your top priority by staying up to date on their medical issues. There are a few ways you can do this. One way is regularly checking the CRM notes to see if your patient has called or come into the office recently. Another way is through voicemail to email transcription, a VoIP feature that transcribes all of the voicemails you receive and sends it to your email for you to review when you can’t talk on the phone. Finally, there’s a VoIP softphone—a device which acts just like your business phone but that you can take with you anytime anywhere. So, if you’re out of the office, your patients will still be able to contact you or vice versa about any medical emergencies.
Boosting front desk staff performance
The people manning your front desk will be the first ones to interact with your patients. As such, you’ll want them to be working as hard and as efficiently as possible to give your patients the care and attention they deserve. By pinpointing problem areas with such features as call reporting or call monitoring, you can better train your staff to handle patient inquiries.
Here at Vaspian, we want to help every medical office improve their practice and patient care. For more information about our medical office phone services, give us a call today at 1-855-827-7426.
