A medical malpractice claim can put a blotch on the reputation of your healthcare practice. There are many incidents where patients have suffered due to medical malpractices like not providing timely and necessary remedial help. The negative outcomes of these cases include serious health concerns for the patients and frivolous malpractice claims against the practice. You can avoid these circumstances by hiring expert physician answering services. They help in preventing such claims in the following ways:
Builds Trust and Confidence in Your Practice:
When patients call your office, they expect a prompt response from your staff. More so, they need compassion and friendly behavior to handle the distressed situations. This can be a tough call for a caregiver handling record number of patients every day unless you hire the professionals to handle their calls. If you aren’t available for your patients when they call you, it breaks their trust in your practice.
In fact, there may be circumstances where any delay in providing medical care can result in severe health outcomes. In these cases, patients are more likely to approach their lawyer if you don’t tend to their calls. This is where physician answering services prove effective. They maintain 24/7 availability of your business including on the weekends, holidays, and after-hours.
Ensures Timely and Professional Responses:
In the cases of emergencies, the goal of a medical practice is to provide an immediate and professional response to the distressed callers. You can’t afford to ignore a patient’s calls or put them off-care. You can face a malpractice claim for any of these circumstances. If your call agents aren’t well-trained and they give wrong instructions to the caller, results can be catastrophic for your practice.
A reputed medical answering service can get you covered in these cases. They provide efficient and quick response to the patients using their medical-trained call operators. They help patients to schedule appointments, get basic information, or ask for an emergency dispatch support.
Maintains Updated Documentation:
Sometimes, medical malpractices claims can be extremely complicated. Each case has a different circumstance that affects your chances to get through any frivolous claim. In such testing times, call logs can be effective to save you from severe losses.
For example, a patient may claim that they called more than 10 times but no one from your office responded. Here, if you have proper documentation and call logs, it can be proved in the court that a single call was made by the complainant and it was well-attended to. These logs can be tallied with phone records of medical providers who responded to the call when it was escalated to them.
These are some preventative measures taken by a medical answering service to avoid costly legal claims against your practice. Partner with a reliable company that specializes in quality services and offers 100% HIPAA compliance.