Why Chiropractors are Making the “Adjustment” to Our Hosted VoIP Phone System
Chiropractors are highly educated primary care professionals who develop and carry out comprehensive treatment and management plans, recommend therapeutic exercise and other non-invasive therapies, and provide evidence-based nutritional, dietary and lifestyle advice. However, this is not where their role and responsibilities end.
Most chiropractors are also business owners, which means that in addition to serving patients and managing staff, they must also ensure that their clinic is streamlined, efficient and productive. And that is why a growing number of chiropractors are making the “adjustment” from a conventional phone system, to our state-of-the-art hosted VoIP phone system. Below, we highlight the key reasons why:
Significant Cost Savings
Just like other healthcare providers, chiropractors are under pressure to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Yet as Harvard Business Review points out, cost saving measures or strategies cannot compromise patient care or staff performance.
Our hosted VoIP helps chiropractors significantly reduce telecommunications costs — but without compromising any aspect of service delivery or operational standards — in several ways, including:
- There is no need to purchase an expensive on-premise PBX phone system.
- There are no costly ongoing maintenance fees.
- There are no domestic long-distance costs.
- There are no IT support costs.
- All pricing is fixed and predictable.
- Video conferencing reduces travel costs.
Improving Patient Experience
As noted by the Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research, patient experience refers to aspects that patients value when they seek and receive care, including timely appointments, easy access to information, and good communication with their respective healthcare providers.
Our hosted VoIP system helps chiropractors elevate patient experience in a multiple ways, including:
- Using automated Auto Attendants to answer calls on the first ring, professionally greet patients, and help them direct their call to the most appropriate staff member or team (e.g. changing an appointment, inquiring about insurance, etc.).
- Routing after-hour and weekend calls to off-site call centers.
- Configuring hunt groups (specified phones ring in succession) and ring groups (multiple phones ring at the same time) to minimize the chance that patients will be sent to voicemail or placed on hold.
- Broadcasting recorded messages or music when placing patients on hold is unavoidable.
Furthermore, chiropractors with multiple locations can route calls to any available team member across the network. For example, if there are 5 staff members in Clinic A and all of them are on the phone, a 6th incoming call can be routed to Clinic B where staff members are available.
Enhancing Team Communication
Experts say that in the healthcare sector “communication is the most important medical instrument” — and not just with patients, but among and across internal team members.
Out hosted VoIP system helps chiropractors significantly enhance internal communication in a variety of ways, including:
- Unifying all team members on a single, centralized telecommunications platform regardless of whether they are co-located in the same building, or spread out as part of a distributed network of clinics.
- Giving each team member their own unique extension and voicemail box — even if they are a part-time hire (e.g. transcriptionist, dietician, etc.).
- Enabling team members to pick up voicemails as email audio attachments, so they can be responsive while on-the-go.
- Enabling team members to use the hosted VoIP phone system from their smartphone (either corporate supplied or personal device).
- Using Instant Messaging to quickly and easily communicate everything from updates to meeting requests.
- Discovering at-a-glance if team members are at their desk, away, busy, or on the phone.
- Launching video conferences to connect face-to-face with colleagues in other locations.
- Holding conference calls with unlimited participants.
Increasing Productivity
As highlighted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, cost trends in the U.S. healthcare sector are consistently increasing 2.5 percent faster than the general rate of inflation — which means that chiropractors (and other healthcare providers) do not just want to be more productive, but they need to be more productive.
Our hosted VoIP phone system drives measurable and sustainable productivity gains in a number of ways, including:
- Using advanced reporting capabilities to monitor team member performance (e.g. identifying if certain team members are spending an excessively long time to resolve issues compared to their colleagues or industry standards).
- Enabling authorized administrators to log into the hosted VoIP phone system through an intuitive, web-based dashboard to make a variety of changes, such as adding extensions, routing calls, etc. (Note that all activity is logged for audit and compliance purposes)
- Automatically capturing and logging all calls for training, auditing and HIPAA compliance purposes.
As noted earlier, team members can also access voicemails as audio files. This makes it simple and fast to pass along communications vs. waste time or risk human error by manually relaying a message orally, through an email, or via hand-written notes. For example, instead of obliging a team member to convey a myriad of details in a long, complex voicemail, they can simply and rapidly forward the audio file to a colleague who can listen to it for themselves.
Establishing Business Continuity
Business continuity is crucial in the healthcare space. As noted by Heather Ripley, the head of a national public relations agency that specializes in healthcare:
Business continuity plans have their place in multiple industries, but with healthcare, they need to be a top priority. Having a well-communicated plan can have a drastic effect on your public relations, as well. For all healthcare entities, maintaining positive public opinion can be a tricky balancing act that can turn sour in an instant.
Our hosted VoIP phone system helps chiropractors establish and maintain business continuity through multiple strategies and systems, including:
- Using a geographically-dispersed cloud infrastructure, which in the event of a local power outage automatically shifts to a part of the state or country that is unaffected.
- Using automatic failover to switch to a secondary internet connection in the event that the primary connection goes offline due to external problems with the Internet Service Provider. When the problem is solved, the connection automatically switches back.
- 24/7/365 monitoring by our team of technical specialists, who can solve many technical issues remotely and during off-hours through a managed router.
In addition, our hosted VoIP phone system is run on private, highly secure data networks that are protected by end-to-end encryption mechanisms such Transport Layer Security/TLS and Secure RTP for transmitting media. In addition, our team automatically applies all security patches and updates.
LEARN MORE
To learn more about reaping the advantages of our hosted VoIP phone system in your chiropractic clinic, contact Carolina Digital Phone today for your free, live guided demo. We can connect with you in-person at your clinic, or over the web.
We have in-depth experience helping chiropractors make the seamless and smooth “adjustment” to a state-of-the-art hosted VoIP phone system, so they can enjoy ongoing advantages that include:
- Cost Savings & Cost Control
- Improved Patient Experience
- Enhanced Internal Communication
- Increased Productivity & Quality
- Business Continuity & Robust Security
Discover why we are the hosted VoIP company that chiropractors choose, trust and recommend!
About Carolina Digital Phone:
Carolina Digital Phone is a pioneer of hosted phone services, and provides products that improve the capabilities of business, education and government telephony, while reducing their overall cost. The company’s offerings stand out for their excellent value, including very competitive pricing, the industry’s deepest feature set, ease of deployment, and many user-friendly packages — from a full turnkey setup including dial tone and VoIP phones to automated call answering and routing solutions that work with existing landlines, cell phones or VoIP phones. Learn more at CarolinaDigitalPhone.com
Carolina Digital Phone, Inc.
301 S Elm Street, Suite 601
Greensboro, North Carolina 27401
(336) 544–4000
