Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 tune might still be a classic, but that does not mean today’s companies stick to those hours. In fact, more than 23 percent of Americans work a nonstandard schedule. Take physicians, for example. Not only do most not have regular hours, but they also work a lot of evenings and weekends.
Patients do not only need healthcare during regular office hours. From requesting a prescription refill to contacting their provider about an urgent medical need, they often require communication from a healthcare practice when most staff is gone for the day. After-hours access to primary care practices has been proven to lower the frequency of E.R. visits and reduce the amount of unmet medical needs.
Patients prefer communicating with their providers using the tools that offer them convenience — it’s one of the most significant principles of healthcare consumerism. That is why it’s essential for healthcare practices, small and large, to utilize a HIPAA-compliant VoIP phone system that enables patients to connect with them and receive timely care.
Not just any such phone system suffices. Providers should have access to a solution that enhances patient support while reducing their staff’s workload.
User-Friendly OnCall Features
At RingRx, we built our enterprise-quality phone system for modern healthcare providers who rely on our dependable all-in-one voice, text and fax communications solution. It’s equipped with the latest office and mobile technologies and unique features that help you customize it to meet the specific needs of your practice.
Our OnCall capabilities include a powerful calendar, profile and management system that lets each on-call provider set a custom profile, ensuring calls are managed correctly while reducing administration headaches and patient delays. The on-call management platform also automates connecting callers with after-hours providers using sophisticated customization features, resulting in fewer errors and a shortened response time.
In this blog, we will focus on three of the most popular features of RingRx OnCall: call routing, personalized profiles and shift reminder notifications.
Call Routing
The ideal on-call VoIP phone system should allow healthcare providers to utilize a solution that directs patients calling after office hours to the appropriate on-call medical professional. Such a system also must enable these professionals to set their preferred methods of contact (i.e., cell phone, landline, mobile app extension), allowing the practice to streamline their communication processes and reduce operational costs.
In addition to allowing healthcare practices to screen and route calls to the on-call provider, RingRx’s Call Routing feature sends non-urgent calls to voicemail boxes or other pre-determined destinations. It combines real-time shift calendars with integrated on-call notifications for enhanced efficiency to help administrators and providers better manage employee resources.
Personalized OnCall Profiles
Real-time access is a crucial component of after-hours provider-patient communication, so it’s essential that providers can select how — and when — they want to be reached when they are on-call. The RingRx HIPAA-compliant VoIP phone system lets OnCall users specify what phone to call them and whether to keep the caller on the line or take a message.
Notifications are also part of our OnCall feature. Providers can personalize their OnCall profile to notify them when they receive a new message — by text or email — and when their scheduled shift is about to begin.
Shift Reminder Notifications
These notifications do more than prompt healthcare providers when their shift is about to begin. They also can automatically notify practice administrators of gaps in shift coverage. That way, they can ensure their patients are covered 24/7.
For providers and administrators who want to primarily use the RingRx phone system to notify users of shift starts, there is more than one way to do so. How? By selecting between one-time shifts and repeated ones. One-time shifts occur once and never again; repeated shifts are identical and recurrent according to some weekly schedule. This feature, combined with the OnCall profiles, gives practices a system that can be customized just how they want based on their business needs.
Discover how RingRx’s OnCall system can improve after-hours communication in your healthcare practice, ensuring seamless, HIPAA-compliant patient connections when needed. Schedule a demo today to see how our tailored features, like call routing and personalized profiles, can enhance your practice’s efficiency and patient care.
