Even the best doctors are only as beneficial to their patients as their answering service allows them to be. When patients receive poor assistance from their doctor's answering service, it reflects poorly on the practice. A good answering service helps doctors take better care of their patients by establishing courteous, efficient connection with their healthcare provider. When doctors want superior after-hours service, they should carefully choose the right answering service to answer phone calls.

For the evening and early morning hours, doctors need a professional staff to answer their lines; they need people who will take their patients seriously and directly transfer their urgent calls. Doctors need telephone support that follows specific protocol instructions, so that they will only directly receive their urgent and emergency calls, leaving non-priority calls on voice mail or in a report directed to their daytime receptionist.

To find the best answering service, doctors search for services that:

Customize their service packages. Answering services should have all the tools to offer unique, customizable service packages that will perfectly fit a doctor's requirements. For example, an oncologist may have detailed directives for particular patients, that may have dire consequences if not followed. Oncology patients need to be able to contact their doctor or covering physician with questions through the answering service, without experiencing delays. Great answering services know that doctors need flexible and reliable support.

Can immediately update on-call rosters. Doctors are just as susceptible to familial and personal emergencies as the average person. Doctors need to be able to designate another medical professional when problems arise. Answering service operators should be made aware of changes immediately so that clear communication between doctor and patient doesn't skip a beat. Having an answering service that can promptly update on-call rosters means prevents operator errors before they occur.

Have a variety of message reception options. Good answering services allow doctors to get their messages in virtually unlimited ways. Don't choose your answering service unless it allows message reception through text messaging, pager, voice-mail, and e-mail.

Since doctors play a vital role in their patients' health, they have to be especially careful choosing an answering service. Choosing the right answering service can have innumerable positive effects, the least being the contentment of the patients.