A nursing agency provides an invaluable service to the community. However, not all of them can function 24 hours a day. In this situation, to better accommodate patients requests, they can employ an after hours answering service. From a business point of view this also means that no opportunity is lost.
This type of service also ensures that the patients are given the peace of mind that their doctors are always contactable. However, running a service like this internally may not be feasible for the agency. The fixed overheads alone will be a big drain on their finances. This is where outsourcing this service to a company that specializes in this avenue can be beneficial.
These companies have staff that is specially trained to accept, respond and re-route the messages to the proper recipients. They can also accommodate special requests. For example, the largest immigrant population in the U.S. is the Latin community. Therefore having bilingual support is essential. The answering service companies can provide you with a bilingual virtual office that can solve this problem.
They can also offer an 800 answering service which gives an agency several key benefits. The 800 number enables the agency to advertise a single number for easy memorization and it also enables them to keep the same number if they operate nationwide. This single point of contact again gives comfort to patients as they can access it from whatever state they are in and seek help from the closest available branch of the agency.