Use A Medical Phone Call Answering Service
Running your medical facility takes covering all the bases during the day, and having things covered in the off hours as well. Your patients must feel that you have their best interest at heart, even after you and your staff have clocked out for the day and even on weekends and holidays. One of the best ways for you to instill trust in your patients is to let them see that you care by not sending them to an after-hours voicemail that won't be answered until Monday. While plenty of phone calls can and will wait until the following day or week, there are some that should be returned if you are to maintain good relationships with your patients. Having a medical phone call answering service taking care of your calls is a great way to go for many reasons, some of which you can learn here.
Create a great relationship with patients
The relationship that you and your other doctors create with patients has a lot to do with the way they feel about your overall approach to their health. Also, it has much to do with how they feel about your ability to correctly diagnose and treat their health conditions. However, they also need to feel at ease with you so that they can tell you things that can often be embarrassing or even hard to admit, but that will be important to their health. They also need to feel that you care about their wellbeing so that they know you will do your best to find answers where there may not currently be ones. If your patient feels you are completely unreachable after-hours no matter what, then you can cause them to feel so undervalued that they quickly look for a new doctor. An answering service can help patients feel important because they can access you if the need truly arises.
Be aware of your patient's emergency needs
You work hard, and you need time to yourself to rest, recuperate, and enjoy the life you work so hard to earn. This means you should expect to enjoy your time off and expect to sleep well after you leave work. However, while all of your patient's minor issues can wait, there are some that you want to be woken up for. An answering service can take messages but also let you know when a patient needs you to a degree that you specified is necessary to alert you for.
Make your own rules
When you are off, you will have a dedicated, professional, and reliable medical phone call answering service who will be able to take messages for you, but who can also alert you to certain calls, depending on the types of calls you have chosen to take, if any. If you are an OBGYN, you may only want calls about patients in active labor or ones that are possibly life and death situations. You set the rules, and the answering service will take care of the rest.
To learn more about medical phone call answering services, consult a resource in your area.