IVR

IVR Technology Group, a provider of intelligent voice response services and solutions, has unveiled its second generation of MDCall, a feature-rich and cost-effective alternative to live-operator afterhours medical answering service, labeled iAnswer.

Officials with IVR Technology said that, clients, ranging from solo practices to large medical groups, use iAnswer's automated answering service to create a highly accurate, consistent, and reliable call experience for patients.

"Medical practices are resigned to using answering services that are often expensive, prone to error, hard to reach, and sometimes, even unprofessional”, said IVR Technology Group's John Crouthamel , in a statement.

Crouthamel said that hardly surprising since most traditional answering services suffer from high operator turnover rates and overworked staff.

He said that low automation in the industry also means a practice has to spend more time sending verbal and written communication and ensuring that instructions are met.

Company officials said that iAnswer addresses all of these shortcomings.

According to company officials, the iAnswer system also knows when a message is picked up or not and thus will follow protocol exactly to continue paging a provider or escalating the call.

A practice can define on-the-fly how many pages should go out, to what devices and individuals, and in what order.

iAnswer’s automated medical answering service also has other important benefits. It keeps a copy of each patient message for liability protection. It provides features such as voicemail-by-email, web-based on-call schedule management, and mobile messaging.

It also gives a busy provider the peace-of-mind of immediate control of their on-call contact settings.

Company officials said that via the web or phone, a doctor can change where they should be contacted (smartphone, home phone, pager, or email).

Thus, if a provider damages or looses their pager, they can immediately change call alerts to their cell phone via the web without the hassle of calling into an answering service.

“All this with one key benefit – an automated answering service is, hands-down, more cost-effective than a live-operator service,” said Akash Desai of IVR Technology Group.

Desai said that iAnswer provides more services while costing much less than traditional live operator answering services.