3 Ways to Boost Medical Employee Productivity

Ensuring medical employee productivity remains one of the most important components of a highly functioning medical practice. Your office’s front desk is a complex engine that powers a health-enhancing machine. It’s unrelenting – from a flurry of phone calls that begin as soon as the office opens for business to a revolving door walk-ins, pharmaceutical reps, and regularly scheduled appointments. In the midst of it all, there are prescriptions to write, records to file, and surfaces and tools to disinfect.

Your patients only engage with you for a short period of time, but the potential impact to their health may be long-term. Keeping them waiting while front desk personnel juggle multiple phone lines can create a frustrating experience. Relieving your in-house employees of phone answering responsibilities allows them to focus on patient-facing service and other critical clerical duties, optimizing your medical employee productivity.

Medically-savvy answering services can provide answers to most basic patient questions, such as office hours, directions, and more, and can tackle various clerical responsibilities, including:

• Appointment scheduling
• Recording new patient details
• Forwarding emergency calls
• And more!

Here are three key ways an answering service can help you boost medical employee productivity, and keep patients coming back.

1. Call forwarding offers continuous coverage of incoming calls whenever your team members are busy helping a patient otherwise occupied. Multiple options are available and can be set up by your telephone vendor. Call forwarding is ideal during peak times of the day and other periods of high call volumes (such as seasonal increases).
2. Secure Texting: In adherence with HIPAA laws established to protect patients’ Personal Health Information, your answering service must be able to guarantee that they can communicate with your practice’s providers without the risk of non-compliance. Secure texting allows providers to access texts via an application, so that patient information never leaves a secure database. Providers can also make notes on the message and share the message and notes with other secured texting users in their practice.
3. Additionally, most answering services provide a client web portal, which allows flexible access to your calls and messages at any time of day or night. HIPAA compliant web portals protect the confidentiality of patient data, and allow you and your staff to:

• Access and manage information from any Internet-connected mobile or desktop device.
• Record messages for future reference.
• Input and maintain your office’s on-call schedule.
• Notify your answering service of a change in office hours or unexpected closure.
• Reduce and eliminate office administrative costs, such as faxing.

For decades, Edwards Answering Service has helped medical practices establish safeguards to protect their patients’ sensitive information while enhancing medical employee productivity. We can do the same for you. Give us a call at 800-606-3273 or contact us to ask about a free trial.