What is a virtual medical receptionist?
A virtual medical receptionist is a real person who works remotely as the first point of contact for a practice. In simpler terms, they are the remote working receptionists for medical and healthcare facilities such as hospitals, clinics, medical offices, dentists’ clinics, veterinary clinics and more.
Even though they are called virtual receptionists, these are real people who engage in real conversations by offering live answering services.
These receptionists handle several responsibilities and offer seamless services by leveraging the latest technology and tools. However, they work under direct instructions to provide customized services with personalized greetings and call screening.
In this article, we will review the responsibilities of virtual medical receptionists and the benefits of hiring them.
Job Duties of Virtual Medical Receptionists
Virtual medical receptionists handle the same tasks as in-house receptionists while working remotely. Here are some of the main duties of a virtual medical receptionist.
Answering Phone Calls
Answering incoming calls is the primary and the most important duty of a receptionist. Virtual receptionists offer phone call answering services for medical practices with personalized greetings.
They learn about the services offered by the practice and work to ensure that the callers receive satisfactory responses. Therefore, they eventually work to enhance the customer experience of the practice.
Scheduling Appointments
Handling the daily responsibilities and managing the hectic schedule of a medical facility can be a challenging task. Scheduling appointments is a critical task that can directly impact the health of your patients and the reputation of your services.
Virtual receptionists can help take the pressure off by scheduling appointments and streamlining the workflow of the practice. They work efficiently to ensure that all patients get booked and the ones that need immediate checkups get prioritized. Along with scheduling appointments, they also make calls to follow up to maintain a streamlined schedule at the medical office.
Medical Insurance Verification
Verifying medical insurance is an essential and beneficial process that helps the practice estimate the total amount payable by the patient. It can then help provide estimated pricing and quotes to patients so they can be prepared to pay the amount.
While this process is crucial, it can sometimes be time-consuming. Therefore, it is best to have virtual receptionists handle it so you can focus on other important tasks. Virtual receptionists handle the entire process of medical insurance verification for existing and new patients and take the stress off the practice.
Manage Prescription Refills
Procedures for prescription refills can be quite challenging, especially for primary care practices. Virtual medical receptionists can help streamline the processes and steps to ensure that the patients get their refills in time.
These receptionists are trained and qualified for refilling prescriptions or alerting the right people to process refill requests.
Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Medical Receptionist
Virtual medical receptionists handle a lot of essential responsibilities to manage and streamline everyday work, offering some great benefits to medical practices. Listed below are some of the major benefits of hiring a medical virtual receptionist.
1. Focus More on Your Patients
Doctors, healthcare providers and other staff at medical offices deal with a lot of complicated tasks. And things can get incredibly challenging if they’re working with poor backup and patient management. Work efficiency and productivity can be severely affected if they have to manage to answer and schedule patients themselves.
Hiring a virtual receptionist service makes things easier as they can efficiently manage all calls and appointments and even improve the patient experience. Therefore, letting a virtual receptionist handle these tasks can help doctors focus better on patients and other important tasks.
2. Improved Customer Service and High Levels of Professionalism
In the world of healthcare, customer experience is the key to the success. If any patients suffer bad experiences at your practice, the chances of them visiting you again become significantly less.
On the other hand, happy patients leave good reviews and are more likely to recommend you. Focusing on customer service can directly help you improve your reputation and grow your practice.
This is why it is important to make your patients feel valued and prioritized in all situations.
When you hire a virtual receptionist service, they work proactively to answer all patient calls, schedule appointments and resolve and address concerns. It helps ensure a smooth experience for patients and reflects the professionalism of the practice.
3. Saves Your Practice Money
Apart from managing tasks to help the practice grow, hiring a virtual medical receptionist also helps cut extra costs.
Staffing can be a real concern for practices that want to manage their costs and be more cost-effective. There are many other costs apart from the salary to be taken care of when hiring an in-house receptionist.
However, appointing a virtual medical assistant to do the job can help cut down all these unproductive costs as they work remotely and do not require office resources from you. They use their own equipment to work and do not require any additional benefits from the practice. This makes hiring a virtual receptionist a highly cost-effective solution for medical practices.
4. Reduces Administrative Responsibilities
Running a successful medical practice is a highly demanding job. There are new procedures and statutes every day and handling all the paperwork can be a dreadful task. Moreover, these unskilled tasks offer little value to the practice and take up a lot of time for the admin staff to complete.
A fully trained virtual receptionist can handle all these tasks efficiently and helps reduce administrative responsibilities. It takes the extra burden off of in-office staff so they have the time and energy to focus on other valuable administrative tasks and responsibilities.
Apart from this, hiring a virtual receptionist for mundane tasks also gives the time and opportunity to the in-house staff to learn and improve their skills.
Choose Gabbyville’s Medical Answering Service for Your Business
Hiring a virtual medical receptionist can help your practice grow in a lot of ways. They handle calls, appointments and help manage everyday tasks and streamline processes for better patient care and experience.
Gabbyville offers medical answering services for medical practices to help manage calls and appointments and increase the productivity of the practice. This includes handling inbound and outbound calls, scheduling appointments, handling virtual tasks and sending appointment reminders. You can request full-time and part-time customized services as per your needs such as call screening, custom call handling instructions, personalized greetings and more.
At Gabbyville, we help you make real connections and offer a great experience by delivering your voice with a smile. Our Gabbonistas are extensively trained to handle all the offered services with utmost professionalism.
Let our virtual receptionists help you create an organized practice by forwarding your calls to us.
Get in touch with us to learn more!
