Well for starters, owning an automated dialer to do all your appointment reminders can reduce staffing expenditures and free up valuable resources. Sounds very appealing when you’re a medical office manager.

Most private practices generally experience a low turnover rate in administration staffing, however, medical offices with larger patient bases, namely; hospitals, group practices, outpatient care centres, treatments centers, diagnostic centers and rehabilitation centers, tend to turn to recruitment agencies to bring in contract administrators to handle their patient communications needs. Why? Because nobody likes doing it; hence the reason for the demand in hiring temps. But having a new face in your office every other week to can work against you from a budgetary standpoint. Employing an automated dialer over a temp seems to make more sense.

But managers are not the only ones that find automated dialers attractive. Keeping on top of patient scheduling can be a cumbersome task to full-time medical administrators, since their time is so spread thin. When your plate is full and your confirmation list exceeds 10 calls a day, an automated dialer can be your best friend. So if you’re an administrator and you need to propose this solution to your boss, what would you say to him/her? Well, just imagine that you’re a manager and somebody told you that a series of automated dialing applications could be made readily available to you at a low cost to automate appointment reminders and deliver important correspondence to patients with the click of a mouse so that you wouldn’t have to. Wouldn’t you jump on that? Especially if you knew it would significantly cut staffing costs and resources. You might hear the words "Where do I sign" come out of your boss’s mouth.

There are things you should know about the automated dialing business. You’re probably aware that there are several Application Service Provider (ASP) companies out there that offer this type of service. They make it sound real simple to do. Just upload your appointments via the internet and their service will call the patients for you. But what you probably didn’t know is that there are also companies that are in the business of selling hardware / software systems to medical offices that do the same thing and more. That’s right, a compact version of the same system that the ASP companies use to host their services with. The difference is, these units will actually connect and integrate with your existing telecommunication and practice management system, and you won’t have to enter the appointments manually. This means you get to own your own system. You pay for it once and it’s yours. Just think of the possibilities. Maybe you could even provide your own hosting services to other medical offices other than your own. Ok, lets not get carried away here, but you must admit, it does sound exciting.

Flexibility is another thing to consider. Most ASP companies typically host generalized applications that require their end users to follow very specific guidelines. So if you’re a manager or stakeholder of a medical practice, you might be disappointed with your lack of options when using a hosted service to compose and send appointment reminders or other messaging campaigns to patients. Why do they do that you ask? Well, they may want to keep the service as basic as possible for obvious reasons. Keep in mind that the manufacturers of the automated dialing systems are the engineers of the applications that most ASP companies use to host and resell as a service to their customers. So it’s likely that your choice of options would be greater if you were to invest in your own system and buy directly from a company who sells automated dialing hardware / software systems. They may even entertain custom tailoring to suit your needs better. Sounds like a no-brainer.

So now the million dollar question would be, "What would end up costing more in the long-term?" Well the answer is simple. Estimate what the average cost per month would be on a service, then calculate what that totals in a year and multiply it by 5 years. Then compare that total with the cost of an outright purchase for a system. You’d be surprised at how close the numbers are. So wouldn’t it make more sense to own something at the end of 5 years that you could still continue using and grow with your business? Another consideration is that most ASP companies are using more profitable formulas to charge for their services than ever before. What started off as a mainstream standard of billing for ASP services has suddenly turned into a competition of complex strategies for maximizing revenues on long or short term service bundles, depending on the billing formula they use. It’s almost like they’ve got the art of squeezing more money out of their new or existing customers down to a science, without actually having to change the quality of the service they provide. Scary thought.

If you’ve read up to this point, then you’re probably wondering "Who’s offering this kind of hardware / software solution?" They’re called TasTec Inc.. and they offer a solution called the "ICS" (Integrated Communications Server), an award winning multi-application voice-processing platform that facilitates: Automated Dialing, Voice Mail, Fax Mail, Unified Messaging, Onhold Messaging, Speech Recognition and several other bolt-on applications such as the "VG Assistants"; a group of interactive Voice Broadcasting and Text-to-Speech Broadcasting Notification and Automated / Predictive Dialing modules, fittingly designed for various industries; medical, pharmaceutical retail, dental, automotive, education, real estate, golf club, grocer retail, electoral, and more.

The CEO of TasTec Inc.., Tony Masci, talks about his experiences as a former product manager for the manufacturer of this solution, who’s now a strategic alliance partner of TasTec Inc. "In the 15 plus years I’ve spent in the solution selling business, I’ve liaised with thousands of clients in desperate need of diversity to help solve their unique business task challenges, and in those years, I’ve never witnessed a better ROI opportunity than this. There’s a solution package you can acquire called the ICS and Medical Assistant module. It will protect and grow with your telecommunications investment, saving you thousands of dollars on improved communications just between medical staff and patients alone, by decreasing number of no-shows and freeing up staffing resources. Pharmacies can offer value-add service to customers like medication reminder and automated prescription refilling to improve loyalty and share of wallet as a courtesy or even as a revenue generator. Medical offices wishing to start with basic call processing functionality can do so at low entry cost by starting with the base ICS server and Medical @ssistant module, and later upgrade by adding sub-modules as their budgets permit. Install one or all; they can work independently of each other. You can make your new or existing telecommunication infrastructure more intelligent with the ICS alone. The ICS as an off-the-shelf base system improves any medical office’s intra & extra communications. Its open system architecture and modular scalability allows for low entry cost and affordable expansion, protecting the medical organization’s communication investment today and into the future."

Visit TasTec Inc. for more information.