Medical providers work long hours to provide the highest-quality care to their patients. But even the hardest-working practices will sometimes miss opportunities to serve their patients. Whether it’s the back-to-school rush, cold and flu season, or just a day with unusually high call volumes, medical practices sometimes find they cannot get to every call and every patient as quickly as they — and their patients — would like.
## The Alarming Reality of Missed Calls
On any given day, any medical practice may miss out on some opportunities to provide care. The reasons vary: The practice’s phone system may be out of date and unable to keep up with call volumes. The answering service may not have sufficient capacity, or the people answering the phones may lack access to patients’ medical records, resulting in less-than-ideal care experiences for those patients.
## The Financial Impact of Missed Calls
Of course, no practice can offer the full range of its service around the clock. Sometimes, patients who call after hours will wind up in a hospital emergency room or at an urgent care facility. They will receive care from someone other than their primary care physician, and the revenue generated by that encounter won’t be recovered by the practice.
## Assessing the Scope of Missed Calls and Care
The question, then, isn’t whether missed calls and missed opportunities exist, or whether some revenue will elude a practice. Those are realities. But practices can reduce the number of calls they miss, expand access to care, and make patients’ experiences better. They can do so by asking questions that matter: Is the practice missing a significant percentage of incoming calls — day or night — either because their phone system cannot handle the volume or they lack sufficient front-office personnel to answer those calls?
The short answers are: All practices miss some calls, some patients will go elsewhere, and new technologies will almost certainly pay for themselves in short order. In other words, giving patients a digital front door to access your services is always going to be better than leaving them hanging somewhere in cyberspace.
## Getting at the Numbers
How much revenue is at stake is hard to estimate. There are dozens of contact center solutions on the market, each of which offers an estimate for how much revenue missed calls may be costing a practice — and how much can be recovered. But such claims cite internal studies and research, not independent third parties.
## The healow Genie Difference
The healow Genie AI-powered contact center solution illustrates exactly why investing in new technology is so important. healow Genie operates 24/7/365, eliminates on-hold time, and can provide patients with answers to many routine questions and tasks, including office hours, locations, appointment management, referrals, and prescription refill requests. healow Genie can be integrated with any EHR and therefore works seamlessly with eClinicalWorks. And Genie can be used alongside any other phone systems a practice may be using for fielding patient calls.
Learn more today at [genie.healow.com](https://genie.healow.com/).
