In a medical practice, urgent scenarios can take place beyond the normal office hours. This is the reason why medical offices prefer hiring a professional answering service that remains available to their patients around the clock.
Whenever an emergency strikes, these services guard against burning out your personal capabilities. They take after-hours calls for patients having emergency health concerns.
For fast and expert medical advice, agents contact an on-call person and follow the protocols predefined by you. Here are some common on-call protocols followed by medical practices to ensure better patient care.
Daily On-Call Protocol:
A lot of medical facilities prefer a daily rotation of on-call protocols. This is done to lighten the workload on a single person. The daily rotation helps in minimizing the time spent by a person for handling these scenarios. The responsibility is shared among the providers to maintain a reasonable and fair approach.
However, handling the protocols on the weekends can be slightly challenging. To address this challenge, practices implement to rotations for weekdays and weekends accordingly. You can set up the right protocol with the help of your physician answering service to make the process seamless and effective.
Weekly On-Call Protocol:
In this system, one person is assigned to handle the on-call scenarios for the entire week. For example, from Monday evening to the next Monday morning, this person will be liable to respond whenever a call is escalated to him/ her. This is an intense protocol for the person but, provisions can be made to offset their after-hours duties with flexible workload.
On-Call Protocols as per Expertise:
The larger medical practices and healthcare clinics work with multiple specialties. In fact, they need an on-call protocol for each area of expertise possessed by their staff. It means that multiple people are available on call at any given time. In such situations, a physician answering service will make an assessment if a call is truly urgent to be escalated to an on-call person.
Depending on this, they transfer the call to the right person assigned to handle the protocol. In most of the cases, each of these on-call people serves as a backup for each other. It depends on the coordination within the practice.
Single Person On-Call Protocol:
The individual practices having a limited staff and single specialty use this protocol. Typically, the doctor is always on call in these facilities. To address this scenario, they can share their on-call protocols with another individual practice having similar requirements. The on-call responsibilities can be rotated between these two practices to maintain flawless patient-related services.
These are some important on-call protocols used by the medical facilities. Establishing the right protocol is essential to maintain the credibility of practice. Hence, you should prefer an answering service that can adapt to your on-call preferences.