On Call Central White Papers
On Call Central can help solve a variety of call management and operational challenges common in medical practices.
Reducing After Hours Calls
Every medical practice must deal with managing after-hours consults and patient care requests. Unfortunately, most live operators are not medically trained, and can do a poor job of differentiating between urgent and non-urgent issues, and do an insufficient job of screening calls. As a result, most medical practices receive a large volume of non- urgent phone calls related to issues more appropriately handled during regular business hours. We have found that most On Call Central customers report a significant reduction in after-hours calls after implementing just a few simple techniques, and they could be helpful to all medical providers. Collectively, these techniques often reduce after hours call volume by 50% or more, significantly increasing the quality of life for medical providers without sacrificing patient care. The following eight techniques are what we have found to be most effective.
Automating Management of Overflow Call Volume
Sporadically high call volume is an increasingly common issue in the modern medical practice. Peak call times, such as Monday mornings, lunch, and closing time are often characterized by inbound call volume that exceeds a practice’s ability to immediately address patient requests. During these high traffic periods, waiting times exceed management’s targets, call abandonment rates rise significantly, and patients become frustrated by poor customer service. Though the problem is obvious, management frequently struggles to cost-effectively remedy overflow call challenges. It is prohibitively expensive to hire additional employees for sporadic overflow call needs. An alternative to hiring additional employees—a live answering services—can be similarly expensive, yet still requires your staff members to call patients back to resolve their issues. There is, therefore, a need to provide practice managers the tools necessary to achieve higher levels of patient satisfaction through the increased productivity of existing labor resources. This On Call Central white paper shows how practice managers can resolve overflow call challenges through automation, without resorting to additional hiring, or outsourcing to expensive call services.