Answering Service Companies, Really Necessary?
Long-time lurker, haven?t posted since 2012. Solo family practice in S. Florida, seeing between 30-35 patients 8AM-5PM, Mon-Friday. Office closed daily from noon-1PM for lunch. We are currently paying $500 every 3 months for our ?unlimited? answering service. We upgraded to VOIP phones in 2011 and thus are able to track call statistics in Excel, such as number of calls forwarded to external answering service after hours. Over the past 12 months, we have had an average of 391 calls per month forwarded to our answering service.
Of these 391 calls, I would say a great proportion are about med refills, telemarketers, and other non-emergency items.
I want to know how everyone deals with after-hours phone calls? I am not on call at the local hospital and haven?t even been to the hospital in years. I have agreements with hospitalists to admit my patients. I maybe get a call once monthly at home from a hospitalist about a patient that was admitted or had emergency surgery. Otherwise, I will just receive a report the next morning.
Patients that call after hours are told to go to the ER if it is an emergency, or wait until the next business day for an appointment (we get about 5-7 walk-ins daily, depending on the season). We also get audit calls from the state Medicaid department checking on our response times and appointment availability.
When we upgraded to VOIP phone services, we also contracted our current answering service. Before that, the office manager received after-hours calls and would handle them. Prior to that, we had an answering service we paid per call or per minute, I don?t remember, but it ended up being very expensive.
I really enjoy reading this board, even if I don?t contribute all that often.
-Anthony
