When patients call your practice, who is the first point of contact to help them? If you’re like many doctors’ offices, it’s nonclinical operators. While these individuals serve an essential role — offering kind, receptive interactions to address patient needs and concerns — they can also have difficult times sharing information to nurses that accurately reflect patients’ conditions. In many cases, symptoms can be overlooked or misreported that would reclassify a patient’s request as more urgent than its original version. Let’s explore why medical answering services need help with their intake, and how TriageLogic’s MedMessage Assist™ is their best option.
Challenges in Medical Message Intake
Here are the key areas where medical messages need the most improvement.
Accuracy
Nonclinical operators may record inaccurate information or fail to get clarification on certain reported symptoms. These errors can lead to inappropriate care recommendations, which can risk patient health and practice liability.
Response Times
Triage nurses base their callback times on the severity of patient symptoms. Because nonclinical operators are not certified medical professionals, they may fail to clarify certain symptoms that could influence those callbacks, inadvertently leading to delayed care. As a result, patients may become dissatisfied or experience adverse medical reactions before they can be helped.
Liability
Inaccurate or delayed message intake could lead to a malpractice claim. Ensuring precise and timely information helps mitigate legal risks.
The Role of Medical Answering Services
While we’ve noted the challenges for medical answering services, we also have to acknowledge why they’re so important.
Improved Patient Care
When they’re able to answer all patient calls promptly and professionally, nonclinical staff can easily boost patient satisfaction and trust.
Reduced Administrative Burden
Hiring nonclinical operators makes sense for many practices from budgetary and organizational perspectives, separating administrative work to non certified professionals and direct patient care to providers.
Enhanced Accuracy and Compliance
Based on their available tools and training, nonclinical operators can help practices meet key regulatory standards, from HIPAA to cybersecurity.
For these reasons, we recognized that nonclinical operators were in need of a powerful tool that could help them ensure accurate medical messages and bridge this communication gap with triage nurses. That’s why we developed MedMessage Assist (MMA).
Introducing MedMessage Assist
MMA uses augmented intelligence to help operators achieve over 99% accuracy on all medical message intake. It does this by actively analyzing the text that operators are inputting into their patient files in real time when speaking with them over the phone. When it identifies symptoms that may require further information, it prompts operators to ask those patients clarifying questions. This identifies more urgent cases and allows them to be escalated appropriately.
Key Benefits of MedMessage Assist
- Increased Accuracy: MMA has been shown to dramatically reduce intake errors with minimal training required. It teaches users in the same way that it prompts them with questions during live patient interactions.
- Reduced Response Times: By streamlining the message intake process, MMA enables faster communication between patients and healthcare providers for higher patient satisfaction and better health outcomes.
- Liability Reduction: Accurate and timely message handling through MMA helps mitigate the risk of malpractice claims.
Implementing MedMessage Assist in Your Call Center
For nurse call center managers who want to improve their medical answering services, MMA offers better results than traditional nonclinical training. Implementation is straightforward and intuitive so that call center personnel can quickly adapt and start to see immediate results.
Our platform is also designed to integrate with existing healthcare communication platforms so that you don’t have to worry about misplaced or duplicative patient data. Whether your call center operates independently or as part of a larger healthcare system, our software enhances message intake without disrupting existing workflows.
Most importantly, MedMessage Assist is compliant with HIPAA and meets cybersecurity best practices when it comes to encryption, access controls, and the use of a private cloud.
The Future of Medical Answering Services
Medical answering services are the face of your practice and are vital to care. By improving the accuracy and response times of that service, nurse call center managers can ensure better patient outcomes, less administrative strain, and reduced liability.
Would you like to see how MMA can benefit your practice? Contact us to schedule a free demonstration.
About TriageLogic
TriageLogic is a URAC-accredited, physician-led provider of top-quality nurse telehealth technology, remote patient monitoring, and medical call center solutions. Founded in 2006, the TriageLogic Group now serves more than 22,000 physicians and covers over 42 million lives nationwide.
