Answering Service
Having an automated answering service with functionality to send text messages and calls straight to the doctor-on-call's cell phone has been the way to go for us and we highly recommend that approach. Not having live operators (many services provide this, we use MedXCom) made the most sense for our practice. First of all, it's cheaper to have an automated service. Beyond that, we feel comforted that it minimizes human error (or a less than stellar attitude on the other line). Our answering service records the messages from patients and plays them back to us. Importantly, when we call the patient back using the app, the conversation gets archived for 10 years. We love that we can easily switch around our call schedules, change our preferred modes of contact and add on covering doctors with the click of a button.
