Whether yours is a small solo practice, a multi-location office and physician practice, a family medicine office or a center for specialized care, it all begins with your patients and the treatment that they receive. Your desire to run your office efficiently and cost-effectively is always balanced by the need to be responsive, compassionate, and complicated by compliance responsibilities. The good news is that all of these demands can be met with a Voice Over Internet Protocol HIPAA-compliant phone system.
What Is VoIP and Why Is it Important for Healthcare Practices
You’ve probably heard of VoIP or Voice over Internet Protocol, but do you know exactly what it is and why it’s making such a difference in healthcare practices?
VoIP is a communications system that uses the internet rather than a physical landline. It uses the same broadband that you rely on for your WiFi access, and in doing so, it bypasses the phone company and creates the ability to access many more benefits and features.
Though it’s natural to anticipate that adopting a VoIP system would mean buying a lot of new hardware and specialized phones, the truth is that you can use either desk phones, existing mobile phones, or both. The system relies on the cloud rather than on-site hardware, and any changes, additions, or deletions to your user base can be accomplished via a few quick keystrokes. You’ll still have access to all of the same features, including voice mail, call forwarding, and call waiting, but with additional features and capabilities that you’ll soon wonder how you ever lived without.
The Healthcare Advantage
VoIP is a cost-effective, efficiency-boosting technology for any industry, but its benefits are most fully realized when a healthcare practice adopts it.
VoIP is far more than a fancy, hi-tech phone line. While it certainly manages inbound and outbound calls more efficiently than your landline ever could, it also offers advanced integration with your patient electronic health records and billing software, and that means invaluable time savings for your staff. VoIP enables multi-form communication, including voice, SMS, and faxing, and when you opt for a HIPAA-compliant system like the one offered by RingRx, your unified communication solution can also be used in a way that allows you to share patient information with essential colleagues in a way that protects patients’ private health information and optimizes patient care.
VoIP Improves Patient Experience and Delivers on their Expectations
Today’s tech-savvy patients have high customer service expectations. When they need to contact your office, they want their calls to be answered quickly, and they want their messages delivered accurately, to the right person and in a way that is confidential and protects their confidential personal data. They expect automated appointment reminders, quick access to their own information via comprehensive patient portals and the ability to speak to professionals who know who they are and are familiar with their needs. RingRx helps you deliver all this and more. Its sophisticated call routing features eliminate frustrating hold times, routing calls to the appropriate department or provider. It lets you pull up patient records at the touch of a button, making patients feel attended to and cared for. At the same time, its integrations with back-office medical systems like billing platforms and patient records reduce your administrative workload. An efficient phone system that can also manage your staff’s most repetitive tasks frees them to attend to more patient-facing responsibilities. They’ll be more attentive and available, freed up to support physicians and practitioners, all while improving patients’ overall sense of your office’s concern and engagement.
Multi-office Capabilities
One of the most important aspects of a VoIP system is its remarkable scalability. A VoIP system can grow with your practice. It is so easily customized and flexible that it is as seamlessly integrated into a sole practitioner practice as a major healthcare facility. The system was created to accommodate the needs of multi-location offices.
Is Your Office’s Phone System Stuck in the Past?
When it comes to bringing new technology into a medical practice, the trend is for medical innovation to be welcomed with open arms, but changing the nuts and bolts of your office’s infrastructure is an entirely different story. The mere mention of a new phone system – even one that helps set up and confirm appointments, shares information, or accesses patient records, is cause for apprehension.
But a HIPAA-compliant VoIP phone system will eliminate so many of your current headaches, from your creaky old fax machine breaking down or jamming up to having to pull and refile paper records. The RingRx system even has an innovative on-call system that lets you track when and where providers work and what device they prefer to be called on. It will make your office run so much more smoothly and efficiently while making your patients’ experience so much better that it’s worth pushing back against potential resistance and testing the new system’s benefits.
For more information on how RingRx can improve your office operations, save you time and money, and provide a better overall patient experience, contact us today to schedule a consultation.
