Dental offices without a dental answering service are at a distinct disadvantage. Even during normal working hours, you can be losing emergency calls by new and existing patients. With staff at lunch or in meeting you may be missing important calls. Patients in a dental emergency will quickly dial every dentist in the area. They will often pick the dentist office that answers the phone, regardless of your office being their primary dental provider.
If the suffering patient cannot find a dental office available to provide emergency dental care, they will head to the emergency room. They will likely not receive the proper care they need. The patient will likely receive antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs rather than dental care. Kaiser reported that a greater percentage of patients are going to the emergency room for toothaches and dental emergencies. These are preventable with proper dental care.
Why Provide Emergency Dental Care? –
Having an on-call dentist helps to provide more return on investment for your dental office. It can also secure you new patients and add to your office’s reputation in the community.
How You Can Miss the Dental Emergency Calls –
The problem is that whether you are the on-call dentist for your office, or if there is another dentist who will work in that capacity, there are likely going to be times when the emergency call is missed. Maybe your on-call is out of range of cell phone reception or is temporarily indisposed. Maybe the on-call may be fielding another call or working with another emergency when another call comes through. In any case, the emergency call is missed. As is the opportunity to serve another patient and possibly gain them as a regular client.
Dental Answering Services Will Not Miss the Call –
The majority of dental offices in the country cannot afford to hire enough full-time receptionists to man the phones 24/7. Also, there is the issue of missing the calls from callers who are receiving a busy signal even with the receptionist you may be paying $25,000 a year covering the phones during business hours. Instead, a professional dental answering provider like Endicott Call Centers will have a staff that is available 24/7. Endicott even handles its own overflow calls, so your patients will never find your dental office’s phone line busy. A friendly operator is there to field their call, day or night, at significant cost savings to your office.
Professional Dental Answering Service Providers are Bilingual –
Another important point is that your community likely needs to speak with your dental office in Spanish or English. At Endicott Call Centers, a professional dental answering provider, we have a bilingual staff. We can work with patient calls in English or in Spanish. The same may or may not be true of a full-time receptionist.
Scripts are a Key –
One of the key parts of working with a professional dental answering provider, such as Endicott Call Centers, is that we work with you and your staff to come up with scripts that will allow us to answer common questions by patients and allow us to help determine how to best handle the call. Thus, we are able to help you initially screen whether the call is an emergency or not, answer patient requests for information, pass the call along to your on-call dentist and schedule appointments.
Once you have worked with us for a while with after-hours and overflow answering services, we believe you may find that you no longer need a full-time receptionist in your office. This provides your office with significant cost savings.
Information We Can Provide to Patients –
We will work with your office to create scripts so that we can answer patient questions about:
- Their benefits
- Enrollment Periods
- Dental plans that your office accepts
- Costs of common procedures
- Coverage plans
- Eligibility guidelines
We are there to provide all the information that an employee in your office would provide.
How We Update Your Calendar –
We are able to securely sync with your scheduling program so that all of our personnel, as well as the staff in your office, are always able to see the most current schedule in real time. There will not be any double bookings. Our access to whatever scheduling software you use is secure and HIPAA compliant.
How We Take the Calls –
Within minutes, you are able to transfer your phones over to us any time you need to. Our access is secure. It is seamless and quick to transfer the phones over to us, and it is seamless to have us work the overflow calls that you may have missed all of these years.
Our small business answering service also keeps track of the metrics of our call center information for your dental office and pass those metrics along to you monthly.
How You Can Update Your On-Call Information or Scheduling Changes –
Some answering providers have you call in to report to them when on-call personnel have information or scheduling changes. We want to make that process easier for our clients, so we have an easy place online that allows you to quickly update on-call personnel information in real time. This keeps you from missing those emergency dental calls from patients and eliminates the possibility of missed communications that could lead to our call center personnel not being able to contact the on-call dentist.
How We Interface Between the Patient and the On-Call –
At Endicott Call Centers, we know that patients can become very frustrated when they are having a dental emergency and have to repeat the same information to two different people. For this reason, we work with you to create a script that takes the key information that we relay to the on-call dentist, saving the patient from having to repeat the same information twice. We are here to have a smooth hand-off with your on-call, for the patient’s comfort.
HIPAA Compliance –
One of the most important issues that can be costly to you as a dental provider is HIPAA compliance. Many medical and dental answering providers state that they are HIPAA compliant when they are not. A lack of HIPAA compliance that results in a fine will be billed to you, as the care provider. We guarantee our HIPAA compliance. All of our communications with patients are private and secure, and all of our operators are trained in HIPAA compliance.
If you are ready to gain all of those emergency dental calls that you have been losing in the past, contact us at Endicott Call Centers. We are a professional dental answering service provider. We will provide you our seamless small business answering service that is highly cost-effective so that your dental office begins to gain new patients you were missing because of lost calls.