Three Reasons Why Custom Notifications Are Important

by Kristen White Blogger The majority of health facilities understand the benefits of providing an after-hours communication channel via the best automated med answering service on the market. It gives patients peace of mind that they have a resource in an emergency, provides a clear way of reaching the doctor on-call and can be quickly modified to give status updates and information to patients and employees in an efficient manner.  However, it is just as important to ensure that physicians are able to step away from their practice, have personal privacy and a chance to relax when they aren’t in the office without having to plan their evening around a potential patient crisis.
 
For this reason, medical offices typically have a rotating on-call schedule (for multi-doctor practices or agreements between offices) so that each doctor is only available after-hours during his rotation. Health answering services should have a custom notification system so that only emergencies are routed immediately and there is a process in place to contact each doctor per their preferred method. The process must also include escalation procedures in case someone cannot be reached in a designated amount of time. Technology has made it possible for systems to call, send text messages, emails and to continually try this over a period of time until the doctor calls back. These terms need to be discussed in advance as, depending on the specialty, the amount of time the system spends trying to reach one doctor and waiting for a call will change. It is frustrating when a health professional is in the middle of personal time and is contacted because the system did not work correctly.
 
Patients in an urgent or stressful situation expect a quick turnaround and patience is very short so the system needs to be reliable to route the message correctly, initiate first contact and then escalate as appropriate to the next name on the list. This way, patients will get to speak to someone soon which builds confidence in the relationship and helps them in a medical crisis when guidance is needed for next steps.  To protect personal privacy, doctors can call the service back and be connected to the patient so their information remains private as it will display the office number when they contact the caller. When looking for an automated solution, one of the first questions is how much do answering services charge but you need to look at the list of services they provide against the competition to determine who provides the most for the best price that fits in the budget. 
 
Simply having an answering machine take messages is not sufficient for patients because it does not help when there is an emergency. ‘Live’ call takers are expensive and human error can distort the original message and create a miscommunication that can be dangerous and damaging to the patient/doctor relationship. The best automated med answering service is reliable, affordable, secure and have the necessary components in place so patients can reach a doctor when absolutely necessary and physicians can protect their privacy and time off with accurate routing and escalation.

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Created on Feb 3rd 2020 06:12. Viewed 249 times.

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