Medical Answering Services: After Hours Voicemail Menu Script

Do your patients tend to rush through phone prompts by selecting “urgent” for non-urgent matters like prescription refills?

When you plan what to say ahead of time for your medical answering service, you can easily route patients appropriately for any given situation, all based on their needs and who’s on call that day.

After-Hours Voicemail Templates for Medical Offices

Here are two customizable menu script examples for your medical practice. These templates help reduce confusion and ease administrative tasks by guiding patients and other physicians, allowing your staff to manage responses effectively during and after hours.

Basic Call-Flow Automation

One example of a customized change could be for “Press 3.” You can change it to say, “Prescription refill requests are not handled by our office. Please contact your pharmacy for routine prescription refills.”

Customizable Voicemail Greeting Template

This is a text-style version you can use for your medical practice:

Step 1: Thank you for calling [name of medical group office]. Our office hours are [time/day]. If this is a medical emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Otherwise, please stay on the line for further options.

Step 2: If you’re calling about a prescription refill, press one. If you’d like [name of doctor/medical group office] to call you back regarding an urgent request, press two. For all other requests, press three.

Press 1 Selection: For prescription refills, please contact your pharmacy. If you have specific questions about your medication or it needs to be called in by [doctor/practitioner’s name], please leave your name, date of birth, and best callback number. Thank you.

Press 2 Selection: Please leave your full name, date of birth, and a callback number, along with a brief message describing the issue you’re experiencing. We’ll return your call as soon as possible. Thank you.

Press 3 Selection: If you’re a physician or work for a hospital, press one. Otherwise, please leave your name, number, and a brief message, and we’ll get back to you during regular office hours. Thank you.

Press 1 Sub Selection: Please leave your name, hospital name, reason for the call, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you.

Note: With medical voicemail scripts or text messages, it’s important to stay HIPAA compliant and train your office staff on best practices. Implementing easy guidelines and policies for how you want to leave voicemails can help your practice avoid costly HIPAA violations.¹ 

What is the After-Hours Medical Answering Service?

Medical answering services manage patient calls outside regular hours, like overnight or on weekends, and can also support busy staff during the day.

Without these services, practices often face delays and disjointed communication, leading to frustration for both providers and patients.

Do These Situations Resonate?

With a properly equipped answering service in place, establishing an accurate menu prompt that’s easy to understand improves the patient experience for inbound patient and hospital calls, especially when your team isn’t immediately available.

In general, there are two kinds of medical answering services in the marketplace: those with live agents and those that route patients through automated menus and guided voicemail prompts.

Live Agents

In this setup, calls to a medical office are routed to a call center typically staffed by non-medical agents. This can lead to issues like urgent calls being misrouted, clinicians’ contact details being shared by mistake, or an unprofessional tone. A poor experience can drive patients to the ER or deter them from returning.

Medically trained agents can handle calls better, but their services are costly and can still lack consistent professionalism. Hybrid options allow non-medical agents to take simple notes and forward messages to on-call staff, leaving trained staff to determine the response timing.

Voicemail Menu Routing

With an automated answering service, guided voicemail prompts and other built-in workflows are used in concert with physician schedules to route calls accurately. Prompts can be given to clearly explain next steps to the caller.

Here are some common call prompts:

• “If this an emergency, hang up and dial 911.”
• “Press one if this is an urgent, non-life threatening manner. Press two for prescription refills. Press three to leave a message for Dr. Cervantes’ office.”

Building an effective communication process for your medical practice saves time for both the physician and the patient. An optimized patient answering service educates patients on next steps and gives them peace of mind that their message has reached the right destination.

With a tech-enabled solution, critical alerts and updates can also be sent automatically to the patient’s primary care physician or medical office specialist.

Healthcare Answering Service: Key Uses 

Prepping for the Holidays 

Optimal patient care delivery requires efficient phone systems, whether it’s a regular day in the office, a long weekend, or a holiday. An efficient answering service will help prepare care locations of all sizes to ensure high-quality patient care by: 

• Eliminating long hold or wait times 
• Correctly routing urgent and non-urgent calls
• Tracking and transcribing patient voicemails and messages
• Routing all urgent calls to the correct on-call provider (and not interrupting those who are off call) 

A high-functioning after-hours call system should include: 

• Flexible greetings and prompts
• Secure messaging functionality for care team communication
• Physician scheduling with real-time updates for accurate message routing
• Satisfied patients and doctors

Routing Urgent and Non-Urgent Calls  

A central feature of a healthy after-hours call system is intelligent call routing. This ensures calls are directed to the appropriate person (or people) based on the nature of the call.  

A call structure might include these options:  
1. ‘For urgent medical needs, press one.’  
2. ‘If you’re a physician or calling from a hospital, press two.’  
3. ‘For non-urgent matters like appointments or prescription refills, press three.‘  

Using this method ensures that urgent calls are prioritized and directed to the correct on-call provider promptly, while non-urgent queries are held over until normal business hours. 

Your after-hours call system should include a confirmation step to verify call urgency, preventing routine questions from reaching the on-call provider during emergencies.

For example: “You indicated an urgent need. If correct, press 2 to connect with the on-call provider. For non-urgent matters, press 1.”

This confirmation effectively filters out non-urgent calls.

Message Holding and Forwarding 

A good medical answering service should also hold messages for later review. Instead of messages going directly to a physician, they can be rerouted to a nurse or admin during busy times, which prevents the physician from being overwhelmed while ensuring no urgent messages are missed. 

Priority and Specialty-Based Filtering 

An after-hours service can help sort calls by priority and specialty. 

For example, implement preliminary prompts like “If you’re a patient with an urgent matter, press one. If you’re a physician or hospital personnel, press two,” to triage the calls accordingly. 

Customizable Prompts 

Set up custom prompts and confirmation menus so patients can second-guess their urgency level. This will help to reduce more routine inquiries from being marked as urgent. 

A modern after-hours service will allow admins to control and edit these prompts as needed. If they need additional help, customer service should be readily available.

Administrative Controls 

Your answering service should also empower admins and users to make the most of its features. These administrative controls should be available to users:  

• Schedule Adjustments: Admins can update on-call schedules dynamically to ensure the correct personnel receive messages. For example, if a doctor is unavailable, they can quickly change the schedule to reroute messages to another provider.
• Holds for Routine Messages: For routine calls like appointment requests or prescription refills, the messages can be designated to go directly to a secure voicemail system accessed by the admin staff when the office reopens.
• Customizable Greetings: Set up both closed and open office greetings that inform patients of the next steps and remind them about non-urgent matters being left for regular office hours.

Security and Privacy 

Security and privacy are essential for handling protected health information. To ensure HIPAA compliance, a robust call system should encrypt patient information and route it securely.

Encrypted messaging also reduces reliance on voicemail and provides a digital, trackable record of all interactions.

Dedicated Customer Service 

No matter how feature-packed an answering service is, it’s the quality of customer support that often makes or breaks the user experience. Choose a vendor whose customer support package includes:

1. Continuous Availability: Users should have access to assistance at any time, day or night, ensuring prompt resolution of issues without having to wait for business hours.
2. Crisis Management: Real-time support should always be available for urgent needs, allowing for immediate intervention in critical moments to mitigate potential negative impacts on workflow or patient care.
3. Specialized Help: Support agents should be available to manage complex configurations or changes, ensuring practices can adapt swiftly to unforeseen circumstances without internal resources being stretched thin.
4. User Empowerment: The support team should assist with both immediate fixes and provide training or instruction on how to manage changes independently. This empowers practice staff to handle some modifications on their own going forward.
5. Commitment to Client Satisfaction: The vendor should agree that reliable support contributes to client satisfaction. Good customer support allows practices to be confident that any issues that arise will be promptly addressed. 

The Best After-Hours Call System for Healthcare Organizations 

When a call comes in to your medical office, is the right provider alerted? What if it’s 9 PM on a Friday, and the patient needs to know whether or not they should go to the ED?

Planning ahead for these contingencies will save your medical office hours of time, and it ensures patient care is handled quickly and accurately.

The quality of your medical answering service can make or break your patient’s communication experience. A warm, welcoming greeting sets the tone for your answering service and guides patients to the best place to get their needs met.  

Notably, using HIPAA-compliant voicemail services versus general voicemail services is a best practice for healthcare organizations.

Not a Traditional Medical Answering Service

With PerfectServe’s Dynamic Intelligent Routing®, you can set up call flows to accurately route to the best available practitioner on call. With a combination of voicemail and voice-to-text options, urgent patient requests don’t have to wait until Monday to hear from the on-call physician. PerfectServe syncs in real time with physician schedule changes so your patients and staff know who to contact and when.

Need a better voicemail option for your medical office? Book a discovery call to see how we can customize it for your needs.

¹(2021, October 15). Head Off Costly HIPAA Violations for Patient Voicemail Errors. Healthcare Training Leader® Blog. https://healthcare.trainingleader.com/2021/10/hipaa-compliant-voicemails/