Daily Archives: July 17, 2010

Your patients rely on you to keep them healthy. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had someone to rely on to keep your practice healthy? A physician call service may be the cure you are looking for.

A physician call service can do its part to take care of the health of your practice when your office is closed by providing seamless interactions between patients, doctors and the physician service. However, before you make a decision, be sure to consider these factors when choosing a physician service.

Highly skilled specialized agents — The skills of the agents answering your calls at a call service should be top notch. The doctors in your practice want — and need — accurate information about patients who call and efficient interactions with the agents at the after-hours physician call service. Remember, too, that you want your patients to feel confident they are in good hands when they reach an agent at the physician service. With the correct training, agents should be confident about handling medical calls. They should be well versed with correctly spelling and using the most common terms in your type of medical practice. While they need to maintain control of the call, they also should be sympathetic to the caller’s needs and be able to collect and relay accurate information to the on-call physician.

Confidentiality — Agents answering calls for a physician service should be specially trained to meet the privacy requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). If you choose a physician service without HIPAA-trained personnel, you may run into legal ramifications. It’s worth taking the time to determine whether or not the agents have the right training. HIPAA privacy requirements also extend to patient information sent via electronic devices. That information must be encrypted, so be sure the physician service you are considering offers encrypted text messaging and/or e-mails to meet the letter of the law.

Customized solutions — A physician call service also should offer services that go beyond the standards of a general answering service. These customized solutions are designed to provide efficient, professional services to take care of both doctors’ and patients’ needs. A specialized physician’s service can offer very detailed on-call routing and scripting for both routine and emergency calls. This allows the agents to be thorough in evaluating callers’ concerns, while only interrupting your on-call doctor with truly urgent medical issues.

Disaster recovery plan — A specialized physician call service should understand the need for 24/7 redundancies to protect the service from electrical outages and phone line issues, as well as software and hardware failures. Solutions to ensure the call service is always available to answer your calls include back-up generators and off-site, back-up plans.

Evaluating a physician call service for your practice is really no different than evaluating a patient. Be sure to check out all the basics about the services provided and then look closely at the areas that could become a problem if you are not careful — like ensuring there are HIPAA-trained agents and a disaster recovery plan in place. Once you have all the necessary information, you can make the right decision to keep your practice in good health.