Before, medical consultations, prescriptions, diagnoses, and the like can only be obtained by personally seeing a doctor. Now, with the rise of the outsourcing industry, the face of doctor-patient relationships has drastically changed.
Physicians used to win the trust of patients by constantly having one-on-one meetings, gaining the latter's loyalty by accommodating regular visits to the clinic to listen to health concerns. However, along with an increasing number of loyal patients comes being swamped with so many responsibilities and medical concerns to attend to. Situations involving life-and-death matters would all come at the same time. In turn, some patients are left unattended, making the number of loyal patients dwindle.
Doctors have to cover their areas of responsibility at all times, may it be after their shift or even on vacations, posing a problem on how to efficiently manage everything in need of their attention.
A solution to the problem came in the form of a medical answering service, a type of service doctors can avail from BPO (business process outsourcing) service providers. This service allows dentists, physicians, veterinarians, surgeons, etc., to channel their patients' calls to an operator (i.e., call center agent, customer service representative, or virtual assistant) should they be unable to take the calls, especially on weekends, holidays, vacations, and after-hours.
The operators are usually selected for having medical backgrounds or above-average familiarization of concepts in medicine. Also, they still undergo continuing training to enhance their ability in understanding and relaying received medical information from/to patients and doctors.
A patient who is unable to reach his/her doctor is redirected to an answering service, wherein the operator may inform the patient of the whereabouts of the doctor, takes note of the concern, and then relays the message to the doctor. Also, a medical answering service operator can directly address simple concerns such as providing another copy of a lost prescription, scheduling appointments, confirming availability of lab results, and the like.
The service enables doctors to handle major responsibilities without sacrificing relatively-minor concerns of their patients. Seeing the advantages of the service, many doctors availed of the medical answering service from outsourcing companies (or third-party service providers).
With millions of doctors worldwide taking advantage of the service, the traditional nature of doctor-patient relationships changed; it became more of a "patient to operator to doctor" relationship.
Although the medical answering service has several advantages, it also has the following issues:
- patients are redirected to the service even during clinic hours
- inaccessibility of doctors increased
- inaccuracy of relayed medical advice or information
- mistaking a caller for a different patient, thus the wrong medical data are given
- caller is being put on hold for too long (i.e., minimum of 30 minutes)
- service is used as a means for the doctor to evade a patient
Despite the downside of a medical answering service, many doctors still opt to have the service since it greatly helps them keep up with their demanding schedules. As for the patients or the callers, they take extra steps in making sure that the operator has the correct information.Outside factors such as MCOs (managed care organizations) or HMOs (health maintenance organizations) have played a part in the emergence of medical answering services. Patients usually have a lot of concerns regarding such organizations (e.g., how these are supposed to apply to their payments for the doctor, the coverage of their contributions to an HMO, and the like). The doctors, on the other hand, usually leave it to the operators to make the explanation to the patients.
Perhaps the outsourcing industry still has areas to improve on when it comes to medical answering services. Indeed, matters regarding a person's health are delicate, urgent, and sure to take a toll in the long run; hence, a service in connection to medicine ought to be flawless, prompt, and efficient.
The outsourcing industry's offer of the medical answering service has greatly changed the interaction between doctors and patients, bringing either fruitful or problematic relationships. It is certain, however, that the outsourcing industry will not only continue to affect doctor-patient relationships, but also create changes for the better of such relationships.
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