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Each Medical Clinic Should Have A Backup Medical Assistant In Case The Human Receptionist Is Unable To Work On A Given Day

06.08.2010 by Steven Jeffrey Category Health Care No Comments →

You will know that a particular medical office is successful by the number of patients who are signed up under the care of an adept medical practitioner. If a lot of patients go back to a particular doctor, it means that the doctor is very good. It also means that the doctor must have a very efficient and capable office assistant who takes care of patients, schedules appointments precisely, does not forget to take notes and, last but not least, is kind all the time.

A professional administrative secretary is very important to any medical practice because they keep the medical office running without any problems. They are the ones who deal with new patient signups, maintaining the records of existing patients, adding and canceling appointments and sometimes even dealing with business issues like the the daily cashflow of the clinic.

Let’s see what will happen to a medical clinic if it is left without a capable medical receptionist - problems will start piling up and in the end it will go out of business since doctors themselves do not have the time or skills to deal with all the administrative staff a professional administrative receptionist has to deal with. Such an outcome is exactly the opposite to what a doctor expects when he opens the medical office.

What each doctor wants when he or she opens his or her medical practice is to get recognition in his field as a good specialist, get many new patients to sign up in his medical office and ultimately to grow his medical practice to a large clinic. Popularity and profitability are two goals of each doctor when he or she sets up the medical practice. Most doctors hire an administrative receptionist to help them by taking over the administrative issues. However unexpected things do happen and it may turn out that the front desk receptionist is unable to come to work on some day.

Supposing you are a doctor and your medical secretary gets ill or goes on a well-deserved and mandated vacation. How will your medical office function? That is where the automatic medical secretary, steps in.

The virtual office assistant is a medical management system that supports both manual management of patient accounts as well as patient self-service. The patient self service functions are handled by a separate module which supports many features that save doctors lots of time and money. One such feature is patient self-service scheduling online which means that patients don’t have to visit the clinic in person in order to add appointments and these reservations can be made even during the non-working hours without having the patients to leave their homes.

The automatic front desk assistant also allows for scheduling of appointments over the phone. This feature is also available at any time of the day and is very convenient for patients who do not have access to computers but need to add an appointment after regular clinic hours. The great thing about the automatic administrative receptionist is that it recognizes human speech and is able to talk naturally to patients.

Using this automatic secretary system also allows doctors to decrease drastically patient no-shows and as we know patient no-shows are one of the doctors’ biggest problems since such no-shows mean direct losses for any medical practice. In our case the automatic front desk secretary fights these no-shows by sending automatic appointment reminders where each reminder can be sent either as a regular email, an SMS message or as an automatic phone call.

After reading the the above information you have probably realized the importance of using a backup medical assistant as a backup in case your live receptionist is on a vacation or is unable to handle patient calls for some other reason. If you want your revenue to increase the most cost-effective way to do that is to start using a backup administrative receptionist.

AssistMedic has been providing medical receptionist services to companies in USA and Canada for several years. See their backup medical office assistant that complies withthe HIPAA regulations

It Doesn’t Matter If A Medical Office Is Big Or Small - It Can Probably Make Use Of An Automatic Medical Secretary

05.08.2010 by Steven Jeffrey Category Health Care No Comments →

Regardless of the size of your medical practice if you have been managing it long enough you probably realize that it is extremely important that your administrative staff is able to handle well the everyday administrative tasks. Any experienced businessman knows that the well-being of a medical office depends not only on the capabilities of the doctors working there, but also on the skills of the front desk receptionist.

However, running a thriving medical practice may require the services of more than one office assistant. That is because when a medical practice is booming, it goes without saying that there are a lot of patients signed up for that practice. Aside from that, there will be new patients who would want to sign up for the same practice. Sometimes, to handle the onslaught of patient demands, a doctor hires additional staff. They even hire part-time staff who would handle patient demands after hours.

Remember that for each new employee that you plan to add you will also have to budget a corresponding salary. Let’s say that you will hire an employee to deal with patient appointments - book appointments, reschedule and cancel them. Then you will hire someone to handle the doctors’ daily schedule and then yet another one or two employees to pick up the phone and to deal with the medical billing. This means that you will have to account for another four to five salaries in the monthly budget of your medical practice..

But that predicament is something that can be avoided with the right aid. You can get this much-desired help from a backup medical secretary. It is a patient management system that offers a lot of great benefits in one package.

You can get a backup front desk assistant that’s capable of handling new patient sign-ups anytime of the day. Not only that. The an automated medical assistant is integrated with online appointment scheduling system that enables patients to make an appointment even without personally going to your medical clinic. In case your patients don’t have access to a computer, the system also offers appointment scheduling over the phone. This phone scheduling system can be configured so it works 24/7 or only during off-clinic hours. The automatic administrative assistant of AssistMedic is also able to send out appointment reminders to patients so the costs incurred by no-show patients are dissolved.

And of course the low cost of such a service should not be underestimated. The a virtual medical assistant will not cost you much because you don’t need to install any additional software or hardware. All you need is a web browser with access to the internet. Upgrade are free as well since they are handled by the company providing the automatic administrative assistant and are done on their services. Most service plans for the virtual front desk receptionist also include a free trial to let you use the service freely for several weeks.

All those great features come in just one service package. There are no hidden fees, just the ones which are explicitly stated in the service plan. The savings that you will get from this service and not having to pay more salaries each month will more than compensate the monthly service fee for the automatic administrative assistant.

AssistMedic is a provider of automated office assistant services to companies worldwide for several years. Check out their automatic medical front desk assistant that allows healthcare professionals to manage the content oftheir medical websites through a medical cms

How An IPad Can Help The Doctor’s Medical Office

31.07.2010 by Steven Jeffrey Category Health Care No Comments →

Anyone familiar with the work of a medical practice would tell you that a medical office does not deal just with scheduling of appointments and patient visits. After all if this was really the case, there would be no need for the medical office secretary to exist.

The most difficult part of the job is talking to patients, appointment scheduling and saving their medical records. Now, the main problem with data saving is that, being private information, it is of the utmost importance that all files are kept in a secure and safe place. Can you imagine how you would feel if you happened to know that your personal files were lost? Well, most people would be very upset at the idea that a stranger might be reading the papers they filled in.

If you are a healthcare professional and you run a medical clinic, you by now you should know how important it is that your patients’ documents do not get lost, for, legal-wise, being negligent the “damaged” patient might sue you and your medical office receptionist and, from a strictly medical point of view, should the patient need urgent medical care, you might not be able to provide it just because you can not view their medical record. A real serious problem, isn’t it?

Still it is easy to avoid all these problems by simply taking certain simple measures. In the first place, it is an undeniable fact that we are moving towards a paperless business environment, which is not a bad thing after all. We are going to live in a world with more trees, plants and wild animals, which means we will all breathe cleaner air and pollution-related damages will be significantly decreased.

Even though it may seem surprising that we started talking about medical clinic and ended up dreaming of a pollution-free society, there is actually a strong connection between the two topics. It is amazing how much paper a single medical practice can consume per year. Even if a single medical office makes the transition from a paper old-style office to a modern paperless one, it will contribute to making our planet a better place to live in, but that medical clinic will also be able to protect the patients’ data in a much efficient manner.

So, what steps should we take in order to achieve this?

Steven Paul, better known as Steve Jobs is the founde Apple Inc., the company that everybody loves and worships for having released some cool products, such as the iPod, iPhone and, recently, the so-called iPad. The iPad is effectively a computer with a flat screen that has the same functionality as a regular desktop computer. Actually it is much more powerful than the desktop computers from just a few years ago.

Now, the iPad is not only an extremely trendy, hi-end and cool object, but is also a tool you might use in your medical clinic to relive your medical receptionist of their work related stress.

That is why, when a new patient comes to your medical clinic or even if it is an existing patient that has reached the medical office to attend his appointment, you, might ask him to fill in an electronic form on the iPad, which, unlike the classic paper form, will instantly save the patient’s details on your computer, so that the risk of losing precious information will be dramatically minimized. Also it will spare you the need to manually enter the data from the paper medical form in your computer.

AssistMedic is a provider of automatic receptionist services to companies in USA and Canada for several years. See their virtual medical front desk secretary that can schedule appointments over the phone

Any Small Medical Practice Can Benefit From A Virtual Medical Receptionist

30.07.2010 by Steven Jeffrey Category Health Care No Comments →

Each small medical office has many time-consuming everyday tasks. That is why in this article we are presenting an automatic medical receptionist that has many features that streamline and speed up the everyday work of the medical office. This allows the medical office to become more efficient and to respond to patients’ needs much faster.

Needless to say that the medical receptionist software does not simply contribute to lightening the medical receptionist’s workload, but makes patients feel involved in and closer to the medical practice, allowing them to sign up with it and schedule their appointments over the internet.

Moreover, each and every patient will feel that the medical clinic takes care of him thanks to the email and SMS reminders he/she will receive when date of his/her appointment approaches.

Still, patient no-shows and automated appointment scheduling are a couple of issues that affect both big medical clinics and small ones as well. Actually the automated medical receptionist has not been developed for a specific type of medical practice, but instead it can help all those who want to create a more efficient work place.

Every medical office be it a big medical clinic or a small solo practice has patients who must be seen, treated and cured. Offering these patients extra services like email and SMS reminders, automated reminder calls, online scheduling and custom web forms will only make patients feel that the medical clinic cares about them. At the same time these extra services will simplify the doctor’s life.

Small practices, in fact, having no human receptionist welcoming patients and handling all sorts of complaints, phone calls and so forth, center around the doctor’s figure, who has to perform both medical and secretarial tasks.

The automatic medical receptionist is an extremely professional and effective medical office assistant, that can speak multiple languages, can backup your medical data, call your patients over the phone or send them emails and SMS messages and it can even take care of patients’ appointment scheduling.

How much are you ready to pay for such a medical office assistant? Most doctors would reply “All that it takes”, but the automatic medical receptionist can actually take care of all these tasks for a very reasonable price, much lower than the salary of a regular human receptionist. Moreover it does not make the common mistakes that humans often do when they are stressed. It does not forget to write down appointments, does not delete files by a mistake, never loses important papers and never forgets to remind patients of their incoming appointments.

The great thing about the automatic medical receptionist is that it actually suits every type of medical practice, for it alone performs the same tasks that 4 receptionists together would not be able to perform as efficiently. Now, many of you may rightfully observe that something “virtual” will never be able to replace a human and we totally agree with you. The virtual medical receptionist simply aims to “help” and support doctors (and receptionists) in order to let them dedicate the greatest deal of their time to patients and not to phone calls and data saving, which are indeed very time consuming.

And for those doctors who run rather small medical practices, the virtual receptionist will certainly guide you throughout your growth, enabling you to take better care of your patients and also increase your income, which is never a bad thing after all.

If you want to find out more about the virtual medical receptionist and the ways to add appointment scheduling to your medical website, then check out the AssistMedic service.

Use The Color Display In Your Waiting Room To Tell Patients About The Health Information Form Online

30.07.2010 by Steven Jeffrey Category Health Care No Comments →

Have you ever traveled by plane at least once? If you had then you probably remember those monitors they have to show you how to pass through the metal detector. They tell you to take off all the metallic things you have on and, to make sure you understand what to do, they generally play a video showing either a very handsome man or a beautiful woman putting off their belts, earrings, watches, necklaces, mobile phones and car keys.

The meaning of these videos is that they are “educational”, which means their purpose is to help people to do something right. If you manage a medical office and have just decided to make your services more efficient by choosing AssistMedic or any other automatic medical office secretary and its many features, you probably want your patients to be better informed about these changes and what they can do to get most benefits from them.

Still, you had better remember that even though young people find it easy to create an appointment using an online scheduler, there are many who are not familiar with the technology well enough, and they will probably need some assistance.

Most medical offices have a waiting room where patients wait for the doctor to be available and, depending on how busy the doctors is, they might have to wait from one minute to many hours. Some medical front desk assistants even apply overbooking when scheduling the appointments and this means additional wait for the visitors.

Many medical practices have reached the conclusion that it is better to install monitors which play educational videos and commercials aimed to promote the medical clinic. These displays help patients to while away the time.

Could there be a way to put all this waiting time to a better use?

One possible way to make the most out of those “dead” minutes is by using this time to instruct your patients on what a automatic medical front desk assistant is, how to send a Health Information Form online and what services your medical office offers (Electronic Medical Records, appointment reminders, web forms…).

Another thing you might want to do is to let them know how to schedule an online appointment by using the online scheduler shown on the website. Of course you will need to clearly show all the advantages such feature will bring them.

One thing that is immediately obvious, is that it would be wise to emphasize that this will allow them to avoid driving through heavy traffic in order to reach the medical office and they can avoid the wait in line to schedule an appointment with the medical front desk secretary, since with the online appointment scheduling thay can reserve their appointments from their homes, or even while being in the street, if they have a modern phone like iPhone or Blackberry and it has an Internet connection.

It is the 21st century, and almost everyone has at least one computer and even if someone doesn’t have one , he has a variety of options - go to internet cafe or ask a friend to reserve the appointment for him.

Therefore, we suggest you promote the new services you offer (online scheduler, online forms, health information form, electronic medical records, automatic medical office assistant…) through those displays you have in your medical office waiting room, so that your patients will learn how to make the most out of them and will certainly appreciate their undeniable benefits.

AssistMedic is a provider of backup office assistant services to companies in USA and Canada for several years. Check out their backup medical front desk secretary that can schedule appointments over the internet

How To Allow Medical Patients To Schedule Their Own Appointments

30.07.2010 by Steven Jeffrey Category Health Care No Comments →

Many businesses are starting to use Internet more actively because they are starting to see the big potential of the internet services. All in all a website together with a domain does not cost as much as an office in the city center and it only takes 5 or 10 minutes to upload new data to the web site (of course it depends on the size of the data you are uploading).

In conclusion, the Internet is a wonderful resource that a lot of people out there are already using to make their businesses known to the whole world and to simplify their work.

Now, provided that a medical practice is not only a place where healthcare professionals see their patients and medical front desk assistants answer the patient calls, but is also an actual business which implies certain expenses, adopting strategic measures aimed to improve its services will surely help it grow faster and will achieve better results.

A simple website, for instance, as long as it is well built, may help both the healthcare professional and the medical secretary perform those time consuming tasks, such as scheduling appointments and reminding, data saving and so forth…

But what steps should be taken in order to achieve that?

If you are not a professional programmer and web designer, you might think that an medical online scheduler to your web site is a thing for computer geeks, but this is definitely not the case.

It is sufficient to use a 3rd party medical scheduler embedded into your website through a single IFRAME tag. This will add the ability to schedule appointments to your website and your patients will be able to sign up with your medical practice from your web site and will also be able to reserve appointments online, which will make their lives much easier.

It will not be an exaggeration to say that both your present and future patients will appreciate the features of the innovative online medical appointment scheduling, because it will save them lots of time and efforts. And not to forget about your competitors - they do not want to lag behind you and they will probably do whatever they can to prevent this from happening. After all, they too want to get a certain number of patients in order to secure a satisfactory monthly income for themselves. That is why you should not underestimate them.

Doctors should remember that their patients can be very demanding and they are always searching for the latest online services that can help them to feel more comfortable and what is even more important to save some time. Time is money and no one wants to waste neither of these. That is why an interactive web site that allows patients to sign up with the doctor’s clinic and then schedule an appointment will be welcomed by practically everyone. After all everyone is or will be registered with at least one medical clinic.

But let’s now look at the many advantages the virtual medical receptionist will actually bring to you and your clinical staff. In the first place, you should consider that the virtual receptionist is a medical software system that was specifically designed to help those doctors and medical receptionists who are constantly swamped with work better manage the medical practice.

Practically speaking, the automated medical receptionist aims to streamline your daily work-flow and perform as many tasks as possible for you and your medical receptionist, so that both of you will finally be able to dedicate your precious time to those who really need it: patients.

AssistMedic is a provider of backup office assistant services to companies in USA and Canada for several years. See their automatic medical front desk receptionist that can send appointment reminders to patients

categories: medical receptionist,medical assistant,healthcare,health care,health industy,health,medicine,business,outsourcing

Combine A Secondary Medical Office Secretary With A Medical Web Site In Order To Achieve A Greater Effect

30.07.2010 by Steven Jeffrey Category Health Care No Comments →

Nowadays many people would say that the virtual world is becoming more real than the real one. While we cannot say whether it is the case indeed, no one will deny that the Internet is becoming more and more important and most likely its significance will only increase in the next years. Actually at the beginning we used to surf the net for research purposes, today we can work, meet new people and shop for anything over the Internet. You just try to Google any words and the search engine returns many thousands of results! That’s because there are entire businesses that actually rely on the web and its potential and a lot of companies which wouldn’t exist at all if it were not for the internet.

But let’s get back to our original topic. Any doctor, might need some extra help with those time consuming administrative tasks. It is true both for large medical clinics and for small solo practices. And it is, especially true if the if the doctor does not have a medical front desk receptionist.

You may have already heard of the AssistMedic’s secondary medical office secretary. It is a medical system that has been specifically designed to make your day easier and to simplify your work as well as the work of your human medical office secretary. Some of the many functions performed by the virtual medical front desk receptionist are:

* The ability to import and export medical records and other medical data

* Online appointment scheduling

* Automatic back-up of the patients’ medical records at regular intervals.

* Sign-up of new patients and creation of EMR (Electronic Medical Records) for them

* Sending appointment reminders (by SMS, email and phone)

As you probably noticed, most functions require internet access , for the automated medical front desk secretary is actually tightly integrated with the website of the medical office.

From this explanation it is clear that if you just have an automated medical office secretary without any website then the automated receptionist will have a much more limited functionality compared to the case when it is integrated with your website. It really doesn’t matter if you have a big website with many web pages or just a really baisc one with just 3 pages. Actually you can have just a home page, a page for the patients to make appointments and a “Contact Us” page. What matters os whether your medical practice has a website at all.

Now, it is a good idea to listen to our advice. We know that running a medical practice is as hard as managing any other businesses, and the advice we are giving is wisdom learned the hard way by many other medical practitioners.

Have a nice website built, one that describes the features of your medical clinic, the services that you offer and, once your website is available online, you might think of using an automatic medical office assistant and promoting its many useful features (web appointment scheduler, electronic medical records, medical appointment reminders, etc.) to your existing and new patients.

In case you are wondering what is going to happen next - once the automated medical office assistant is installed in your medical office and your website is connected to it, any website visitor will be able to sign up with your practice, fill out your medical forms that will be accessible online and book appointments online through the web-based scheduler.

AssistMedic has been providing automated secretary services to companies worldwide for several years. See their automatic medical front desk receptionist that can synchronize with mobile phones and Outlook

categories: medical receptionist,medical assistant,healthcare,health care,health industy,health,medicine,business,outsourcing