While there are various means of getting in touch with a company these days, your healthcare business might currently have one communications hub at its heart. The word “hub” here refers to, yes, a business phone system – but is yours quite up to patients’ demands?
What follows is a list of some of the biggest incentives for you to upgrade that phone system to a cloud-based one, with the cloud having helped to make corporate phone systems more versatile than ever before.
You could save money on telephony costs
In an article posted on the NCBI’s website, Harold Thimbleby argues that technology itself “does not have an agenda of helping healthcare”, but instead develops “because it can find ways of making money and reinvesting it.” However, taking up a cloud phone system can lower how much you spend in the first place.
Consider the example of the cloud phone systems by Gamma, which would not require you to spend upfront on hardware or software. You would also have access to low-cost and free IP calling.
Patients could text you rather than just call you
One report relayed by this Forbes article reveals that 70% of consumers favor messaging businesses over calling them, and that text-based interactions garner a 25% increase in customer satisfaction ratings.
One undoubted benefit of texting healthcare businesses in particular is that, unlike calling, it wouldn’t require vocalization. As a result, the patient wouldn’t have to worry about any personal, and potentially embarrassing, details about their health being overhead during the interaction.
You could record calls for compliance or training purposes
Naturally, healthcare is one sector strewn with regulation that must be diligently followed. Therefore, if you were able to record your staff’s calls, as a cloud-based phone system would make possible, this could bode well for your company’s compliance efforts.
There’s also the matter of employee training. When a worker can hear back how they handled a call, they can more easily discern what went right and what went wrong – and thus how to improve for next time.
Your firm could handle vast amounts of patient data more easily
Patients generate huge amounts of data – such as X-rays, blood test results and more – that go into patient records kept by healthcare providers.
Thimbleby observes in the earlier-mentioned article posted by the National Center for Biotechnology Information: “Replacing paper with computerized summaries makes patient care easier and more efficient.” Furthermore, working with infinite amounts of data is easier with services ran in the public cloud.
You can strengthen your healthcare company’s security
As shown by the WannaCry cyber attack that struck the UK’s National Health Service in 2017, healthcare organizations need to stringently guard against weaknesses in their cybersecurity.
The UK Government’s website indicates that WannaCry could have been prevented using basic IT security measures. The site also notes that, using services operated in the public cloud, the healthcare sector “can share data to increase security – and only those with appropriate access are able to see the data they need”.