Service and quality – two of the most important aspects of a medical answering service – often gets overlooked in the quest for the most cost-effective option. At the same time, when you look for a new medical answering service, one also wants to look past the normal rate plans and actually look at the manner in which the service charges. Let us not also forget the company’s integrity itself. Do they seem to want to charge you for every little thing? Things you think seem ridiculous? Like most things, medical answering service quality will vary, sometimes tremendously, from one company to the next. Price also varies, not just in the rates that we charge for various services, but the bottom line. In many cases (it seems even more common in the past few years) we have gotten calls from potential customers who are looking for a new medical answering service because their bill seems to be too high and going up even though their business has been stable. Indeed, when we compare the main rates Echo offers with that of their current service they seem pretty comparable. But when you look at the bottom line things can be dramatic. This is where charges for additional services or even (barely announced) changes made in rate plans can cause your bill to go up seemingly every month.
At Echo, we offer fair rates and plans that we believe offer outstanding value to our customers. As you well know, we can’t tell you our rates are the lowest. As a healthcare professional, you must insist on quality first, and like other products and services quality costs more than junk. But that doesn’t mean you should overpay. Your high quality medical answering service CAN be affordable.
Picking an answering service may be a harder task for a doctor, dentist, or home health agency than for a plumber, a lawyer, or a business selling a product. Like most services these days, answering service customers can be commodities, offering the same service and rates for each different type of customer.
In the healthcare industry, your patients are not commodities! Laws, insurance companies, and your professionalism prevent you from treating them that way.
Even though healthcare providers have more demanded from them now than any time in recent memory, YOU still must deliver personalized care to your patients. You simply cannot pick a large, wholesale, generalized answering service in another state or a mom and pop with old fashioned cordboards and expect to get the same quality you can from a local service that specializes in your field.
At Echo, we have positioned ourselves to serve your needs: Physicians, Dentists, and Home Health Agencies in Southern California, not the needs of doctors in Nebraska or electricians in Newport Beach.
In general, it is probably better to have a medical answering service in a region that employees are familiar with. Our medical answering operators are very familiar with the Southern California region. While this may not be necessary for driving directions (since most people can’t give good directions anyway), it is certainly important for understanding reference points between landmarks (such as cities and freeways) and important facilities such as hospitals and airports.
Also, local people have a better way of pronouncing names of streets and companies that are unique to that area. This is especially true in Southern California, where we have plenty of Spanish names for streets and cities and of course, patients.
Pay attention to the size of the medical answering service you pick. Avoid those that are too small, as they may not have the decent systems technology required to run an efficient medical answering service (see below). They also have a tendency to go out of business unannounced (yes this has happened to many of my competitors and colleagues in other areas).
A medical answering service that is too big can have its drawbacks as well. They just can’t give you personalized attention when you need it, and will be unwilling to make adjustments for unique issues you may have. A simple question like, “How many operators do you have on Saturday mornings?” is a pretty good way to determine. Fewer than four is probably too small, and more than 20 is probably too big.
While it is nostalgic to think back to the old Ethel Merman days of answering services when operators knew your grandkids’ birthdays and how to track you down when you were on the golf course, life is just simply different now. It is more complicated, especially for healthcare providers, and is likely to get more complicated over time.
A good medical answering service system should help manage that complexity as well as help to simplify it.
Your medical answering service should be able to offer message delivery in a variety of ways, including email, fax, text, voice mail, as well as traditional live delivery. They should also be able to do it on an automated basis at any time of the day, and they should be able to do it on the spot for urgent calls. If a medical answering service system can’t do this or they have limitations, think strongly about using them. They should also be able to answer any time you need it, and adapt instructions for call handling promptly.
Calls should be recorded. In California, there is no law that prevents any company from recording any call with or without a caller’s permission. Your medical answering service should record calls and make them available to you if there is some dispute or problem on a call. (Recordings are not permitted to be used in legal proceedings unless the caller is notified that the call is being recorded). But the most important use of recorded calls is that they are an invaluable training tool and can help resolve disputes on calls. Call recording systems, called call “loggers,” are very expensive and most answering services do not use them.
Does your answering service specialize in healthcare communications and medical answering? If not, they probably are trying to be everything to everybody, which means they may not truly understand your business needs as well as they should. They probably don’t know what a “consult” is or even a “code blue” or “stat.” These things can make a big difference in the end quality of your service.
We installed a voice logger for testing purposes.
We moved our offices from a space in downtown Santa Barbara, where we have been located since 1985! We are still in downtown, only about 5 blocks away. The move went smoothly! The building is much more suitable to our business, and we are enjoying the new office.
We completed our second phase of our call center system to Infinity 5.5. We also installed a brand new server rackmount and new cards that drive the system. We believe it is the most sound and functional answering service system available. The installation gave us a few additional features and integrated some existing features that were previously operating on parallel systems. This includes our fax server and our email server. This will undoubtedly improve our reliability and timeliness in delivering messages via these media.
We upgraded our call center system from Infinity 4.4 to Infinity 5.4. It wasn’t much different from an operator’s standpoint, but quite a bit different setting up new accounts and modifying existing ones. It also uses more current technology hardware. This was the beginning of a two phase upgrade our systems to maintain our state of the art technological position.
VoIP, or voice-over-internet-protocol, uses internet lines to talk on the phone. It is definitely an alternative that can work for some medical offices. VoIP has lots of advantages over a regular phone service. However, like any emerging technology, there are still some drawbacks to using VoIP. These drawbacks may or may not be an issue for your practice or office, and they likely will be reduced or eliminated in the near future. As with any emerging technology, as use expands, problems become resolved and features enhanced.
One of the main advantages of VoIP is the low cost. Most VoIP service providers will charge a monthly flat fee, which will give you unlimited calls within a specified region. Charges for exceeding usage agreements will usually be nominal.
Another advantage of VoIP is portability. You can make and receive phone calls wherever there is a broadband connection simply by signing in to your VoIP account. This makes VoIP as convenient as e-mail – if you are traveling, simply pack a headset or Internet phone and you can talk to your family or business associates for almost nothing.
There are many other features that make VOIP attractive:
These are just some of the many services included with Internet telephone at no extra charge. You can also send data such as pictures and documents at the same time you are talking on the phone.
Despite the advantages, there are some disadvantages to VOIP. When the power goes out, your network won’t work, and unless you have made arrangements for an alternate power source, your phone system won’t work either.
There are solutions to help mitigate this: For example, you can install a backup power source, called a UPS, or Uninterruptible Power Supply, which is basically a fancy battery system that automatically turns on if the power goes out. We also recommend keeping a couple of regular phone lines in your office to use during power outages, or have a plan for you and your staff to use cell phones during outages. Many VOIP providers offer a service to route calls to other phone numbers during outages.
Lastly, but obviously of extreme importance to healthcare companies is audio quality and reliability. The first VOIP service providers had serious problems with audio quality, and as a result VOIP got a pretty bad reputation among the business community. But many providers now offer quality that is as good as legacy phone service. The main issue is to find a service provider that has a good reputation for quality. A referral from a colleague or good references are imperative, and the vendor should allow you to set up a temporary system to test quality before you sign any contracts.
Most of these disadvantages are being overcome as technology changes and innovations continue at their current pace. There is a tremendous amount of work being done to increase the reliability and usefulness of VoIP. VoIP has started to receive widespread consumer acceptance.
While the quality and reliability of your phone system is imperative in the line of work, it is still a decision that should be addressed similar to other business decisions: what are the costs and benefits to you and your patients? Possibly not now, but for sure in the not-too-distant future, VOIP will become a better and better alternative.
