Four Questions You Must Ask Physician Answering Services

There’s no doubt that physician answering services are a blessing to busy doctors, dentists, hospitals, and clinics. Whether it’s a single physician practice or a hospital, doctors’ answering services are invaluable aids to ensuring efficiency, productivity, and patient satisfaction.

All physician answering services are not equally effective. Choosing the wrong doctors’ answering service can cost doctors thousands of dollars in lost patients, garbled records, and call management system overhauls. Here are four questions every medical professional must ask an answering service before signing the contract:

Question 1: Are They HIPAA Compliant?

Title II of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requires that medical professionals, clinics, and hospitals adhere to certain set standards when it comes to electronic health care transactions. The same standards are applicable when clinics and hospitals outsource these transactions.

Medical professionals and hospital administrators should check whether a call management service complies in all aspects with HIPAA regulations before signing a contract. This is another reason why it is unwise for medical professionals to employ regular answering services, whose call management protocols are rarely compliant with HIPAA standards.

Question 2: Do They Record Their Calls?

It is important, for legal protection and insurance reasons, that doctors and other medical professionals have a record and/or transcript of all their calls. Hospital administrators and medical professionals should ensure their answering service provider has a provision for both recording as well as storing call records.

It is also advisable to check the safety and security of their record storage facilities. Some questions that must be asked are:

• Do they store the data on site, in the cloud, or both?
• How often do they backup the data?
• How secure is the data? Which data encryption systems do they use?
• For how long will they store the data? (ideally, the service should be able to store the records for two to five years)

Question 3: Who Develops/Checks Their Call Management Scripts?

Ideally, the call management protocols and scripts of a medical answering service must be both developed and evaluated with the help of medical professionals. This ensures maximum efficiency when it comes to information retrieval, patient recruitment and retention, and insurance inquiries.

Question 4: Are They Multi-Lingual?

The answering service should ideally be able to provide multi-lingual incoming and outgoing call management services. Especially if a large slice of the patient population is comfortable with a language other tha
English.

Use these questions to find the best physician answering services for your needs.