If you’re operating a medical practice, whether big or small, you understand the significance of delivering a positive patient experience. If you place a high value on patient satisfaction, your medical practice must be equipped with a dependable phone system for daily interactions and communication.
Your phones are the key to your success. If patients need to speak to the doctor, schedule an appointment, receive test results, or refill a prescription, they must contact your office. A Statista study found that 71 percent of consumers in Australia and the U.S. listed phone calls as their currently most used channel to communicate with a small business. Meaning the phone isn’t going anywhere!
However, without an adequate phone system to deal with this influx of patient calls, you risk patients seeking services elsewhere, which is why a modern business phone system is vital. In addition to keeping patients satisfied, it’s critical to ensure their data is safe and remains in Australian data centres. Below, we’ll explain the benefits of a phone system and keeping your data in an Australian data centre and which one you should buy for your medical practice.
What are the Top Features of a Medical Practice Phone System?
The healthcare industry has changed dramatically in the past decade. In the past, you might leave your doctor a message and wait days for a reply, but today medical practices are moving away from legacy healthcare phone systems and opting for cloud-based options like VoIP, which is so much more than voice calls, and it provides your business with powerful features, such as:
- Call forwarding
- Call transfers
- Call routing
- Auto-attendant
- SMS
- Conference calls
- Call recording
- Simple access to call logs
The features are endless, but if you’re searching for some of the benefits, look no further.
Benefits of a Business Phone System for Your Medical Practice
In this comprehensive guide, we will thoroughly examine the benefits and what you should be looking for in a VoIP provider for your healthcare practice.
Privacy Act 1988 Compliant
As a business owner, you’re responsible for protecting your patient’s personal information from theft, unauthorised access, modification, and disclosure. With sensitive data and communication exchanged over the phone, it’s vital that your medical practice doesn’t allow its data to leave the country. Where a provider’s data centre is located is crucial – it determines the quality of the facility and whether it follows data compliance regulations.
A benefit of keeping your data in an Australian data centre is their compliance with the Privacy Act 1988 and the Notifiable Data Breach Scheme 2017. It means they’re using threat detection software, cutting-edge encryption protocols, and surveillance systems that minimise the risk of data breaches.
If you own a medical practice, your primary objective must be to protect the physician-patient relationship and keep the element of trust when exchanging electronic personal information. All phone system components, including voicemail and messaging, must comply with the privacy act. Choosing a business phone provider that is Privacy Act 1988 compliant keeps your reputation intact and saves you from potential costs due to penalties for violations.
Increased Flexibility
If your medical practice operates in various office locations, or you move around to visit patients in different areas of the practice or at the hospital, you need an option that keeps you in the loop. You need the flexibility a VoIP system offers when it comes to answering and responding to phone calls. Providers can link personal phones through a softphone without disclosing personal mobile numbers, and patients have instant access to doctors for rapid, trusted care. With telehealth becoming a more prominent option for patients, doctors can provide flexible remote consultations to diagnose, prescribe, and care for their patients.
Simple Scalability
One of the most exciting and rewarding parts of owning a medical practice is watching it grow. However, many challenges exist when scaling with one of the larger phone system providers. With phone system providers like RingCentral, hardware installations and upgrades are pricey and inconvenient. For example, let’s say that you only need to add 15 users, but the plan requires you to purchase 20 lines. Now you’re paying for five lines that you don’t need.
With a cloud-based healthcare VoIP system, you can scale your system and only use it for what you need. Adding new users or removing old ones is a breeze and is managed through a simple web-based portal. All it requires is a few clicks. Yes, it’s that simple! Whether you plan on hiring new employees or expanding to new locations, you and your staff will benefit from the easy scalability a VoIP system can provide.
Reduced Costs
No matter how successful your medical practice is, the last thing you want to do is squander cash that can be put toward business improvement. Traditional phone systems do just that because they’re expensive to maintain and require tremendous upkeep. With cloud-based healthcare phone systems, minimal equipment is required, updates are automatic, and you don’t need to be a tech genius to set it up.
A study from the industry leader formerly known as Multicom and now known as Netceed found businesses that adopt integrated voice and web conferencing can reduce their conferencing expenses by 30 percent. Additionally, the use of softphones resulted in average savings of $1,727 per month in cell phone and long-distance charges. These are substantial figures that must be considered when looking for what phone system to buy for your medical practice.
Let Yabbit Help Your Medical Practice Become the Best Version of Itself
With Yabbit on your team, you can focus on what matters – your patients. When you realize that we offer the opportunity for increased flexibility so you’re always connected, simple scalability for when you ultimately grow, reduced costs, and keep your data within Australia to comply with Privacy Act 1988, it’s hard to consider another option. It may sound too good to be true, but it’s a reality when you choose our all-in-one, cloud-based communication system for your medical practice.
If you’re ready to see why so many medical practices like yours are calling Yabbit their solution, it’s time to contact one of our knowledgeable staff members. Let us guide you to success and show you what our phone systems can do for your team.