Well for starters, owning an automated dialer to do all your appointment reminders can reduce staffing expenditures and free up valuable resources. Sounds very appealing when you’re a medical office manager.

Most private practices generally experience a low turnover rate in administration staffing, however, medical offices with larger patient bases, namely; hospitals, group practices, outpatient care centres, treatments centers, diagnostic centers and rehabilitation centers, tend to turn to recruitment agencies to bring in contract administrators to handle their patient communications needs. Why? Because nobody likes doing it; hence the reason for the demand in hiring temps. But having a new face in your office every other week to can work against you from a budgetary standpoint. Employing an automated dialer over a temp seems to make more sense.

But managers are not the only ones that find automated dialers attractive. Keeping on top of patient scheduling can be a cumbersome task to full-time medical administrators, since their time is so spread thin. When your plate is full and your confirmation list exceeds 10 calls a day, an automated dialer can be your best friend. So if you’re an administrator and you need to propose this solution to your boss, what would you say to him/her? Well, just imagine that you’re a manager and somebody told you that a series of automated dialing applications could be made readily available to you at a low cost to automate appointment reminders and deliver important correspondence to patients with the click of a mouse so that you wouldn’t have to. Wouldn’t you jump on that? Especially if you knew it would significantly cut staffing costs and resources. You might hear the words "Where do I sign" come out of your boss’s mouth.

There are things you should know about the automated dialing business. You’re probably aware that there are several Application Service Provider (ASP) companies out there that offer this type of service. They make it sound real simple to do. Just upload your appointments via the internet and their service will call the patients for you. But what you probably didn’t know is that there are also companies that are in the business of selling hardware / software systems to medical offices that do the same thing and more. That’s right, a compact version of the same system that the ASP companies use to host their services with. The difference is, these units will actually connect and integrate with your existing telecommunication and practice management system, and you won’t have to enter the appointments manually. This means you get to own your own system. You pay for it once and it’s yours. Just think of the possibilities. Maybe you could even provide your own hosting services to other medical offices other than your own. Ok, lets not get carried away here, but you must admit, it does sound exciting.

Flexibility is another thing to consider. Most ASP companies typically host generalized applications that require their end users to follow very specific guidelines. So if you’re a manager or stakeholder of a medical practice, you might be disappointed with your lack of options when using a hosted service to compose and send appointment reminders or other messaging campaigns to patients. Why do they do that you ask? Well, they may want to keep the service as basic as possible for obvious reasons. Keep in mind that the manufacturers of the automated dialing systems are the engineers of the applications that most ASP companies use to host and resell as a service to their customers. So it’s likely that your choice of options would be greater if you were to invest in your own system and buy directly from a company who sells automated dialing hardware / software systems. They may even entertain custom tailoring to suit your needs better. Sounds like a no-brainer.

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