In emergency situations, particularly when they are life and death issues or when there are serious health issues, humans are not always effective communicators. This is certainly true for after hour emergency calls to on-call physicians, which can lead to misunderstandings, misinformation and even errors between what the patient is saying and what the operator hears.
At No More Phone Tag, our founder realized this issue after talking to hundreds of medical professionals who were struggling with these problems through live operator healthcare services. Paying premium rates for inferior quality messaging services may have been the only option in the past, but our automated medical telephone answering services have resolved these issues and provided an ideal solution.
Patient’s Message in their Own Words
With our medical telephone answering services, patients call in and select either an emergency or non-emergency message option if they wish to leave a recording. When they select the emergency option, the system automatically alerts the on call doctor within 3 seconds, and this alert can go out over multiple contact numbers including cell phones, pagers, text messages or home phone.
The doctor then has the ability to listen to the message the patient left in his or her own words. No risk of misunderstanding, incorrect transcription of the information or the operator making a decision on what the patient may have meant to say.
Immediate Call Back
We have also taken the challenge out of the doctor being able to respond to the patient while still maintaining privacy on their home phone and cell phone numbers. By simply calling into the system and pushing the return call function, the system will call the patient and connect the doctor so they can communicate directly.
On the patient’s caller ID the hospital, clinic or office number will display, ensuring the patient picks up the phone. The doctor doesn’t have to worry about tracking down numbers, blocking their number from the display, or calling from a home phone that would impact their future privacy.
Additionally, and this is important as well, our system will automatically send a word-for-word email to the doctor’s pre-designated email address. This provides a permanent record of the call and also gives the doctor a reference document that may be instrumental in making a diagnosis or making recommendations to the patient as to how to address the specific emergency situation.
Unlike live medical telephone answering services, our automated systems are very doctor-friendly. With the ability to hear and review the emergency messages, contact patients securely through the system and to have multiple alert options, our systems are designed to make your office or practice much better at accurately responding to all after hour calls.