VoIP For Medical Practice

VoIP, or Voice over Internet Protocol, has been extensively used by small and medium businesses as well as large corporations for years now. Recently, the medical community too, have started noticing this trend and implemented VoIP in medical practice, with astounding results. For people who think that VoIP is best used in commercial or business ventures, read on to find out how VoIP could be the best technology that ever happened to medical practice!

With VoIP, it is not just making and receiving calls over the Internet that is possible. There are many other value-added features and benefits to VoIP that are just not possible with a traditional landline. Here are some of the advantages:

• A busy medical professional who works in multiple locations, or who has offices in multiple locations, can easily get all the calls meant for him, from both locations, rerouted directly to one number on his smart phone. This one feature alone enables medical professionals to give their clients round-the-clock support and assistance when they need it.
• The Voicemail to Email feature ensures that even if you are in a busy meeting, you can read through the contents of important phone calls. This makes it easy to prioritize which ones are the most important to call back, which saves time. It makes it easy to store important messages, either as MP3 files or as email transcripts, for future reference.
• VoIP saves medical professionals and practices a lot of money, by integrating seamlessly services which they would have to pay extra for, if they were using a landline service. These services include call forwarding, Internet fax, video conferencing, recording messages, etc.
• You can set pre-recorded messages for each number in your office that patients will call, which makes it liking having a virtual receptionist for no extra cost!
• VoIP features enhance customer satisfaction with medical practices. For example, when a patient hangs up without leaving a message on an answering machine, the call list on a VoIP can be printed out and such numbers can be called back and inquired. This creates a warm and helpful image of the medical practice in the minds of patients.
• With VoIP, making calls are cheaper than using landlines, and you can make and receive calls even if and when you do not have cell phone reception. This leads to happier patients. Even potential medical crises can be averted when a patient is able to reach a doctor on time, unlike when he is not able to reach a doctor at a time that is crucial to him, such as a medical emergency.
• Numbers from multiple locations can be routed to one central location, which means that you can have an operator to take and route calls in the central location alone, without needing to have one in each and every location.
• Faxes can be sent over the VoIP at no extra cost.

Today, medical practice professionals are enhancing their telephone communication systems to the new VoIP technology, which helps in cost cutting as well as flexibility. When medical practices sign up for VoIP services, they have to ensure that the service provider is HIPAA compliant in order to safeguard the privacy of clients. It sure goes a long way in improving affordability as well as reliability.