With the National Health Service undergoing a revolution in terms of professional supply outsourcing together with considerable investment in practices and combined surgeries, Business Telecom^cf have forged strong links within the medical sector, providing telecommunications solutions to doctor’s surgeries, dental practices and other specialist medical establishments.

As a market sector, medical practices require specific deliverables from systems. Many users from the inbound public are either elderly or frail, often requiring the systems employed to be very user friendly and relatively simple. Many practices also require inbound call traffic to be clearly managed and divided between business users (for example, drug company sales representatives calling to make appointments) and normal inbound traffic from a practice’s patient register.

The use of direct dial numbers will allow the business user or supplier to bypass Receptionists if required and to be diverted to a Practice Manager.

Systems for busy Reception points include Auto Attendant and Call Queuing options which will queue calls if the Reception team are busy on other calls and will act as a filter via keypad options to ensure the correct type of call is directed to the right person or extension. Answer and message facilities are also available to cope with peak call times.

As doctors and dentists themselves are often extremely busy, the use of personalised Voicemail has become popular with many practices. If a doctor is busy with a patient during a consultation, Voicemail can deal with incoming messages and store them ready for the doctor to respond to in between consultations. Business Telecom^cf are also able to provide options for doctors or dentists for the way in which they call patients into the consulting room for their appointment with some favouring a loudspeaker system (sometimes linked to illuminated signage) in the waiting area, whilst others prefer to ask Reception to call in a waiting patient.

After surgery hours are catered for with combinations of automatic call diversion routing where appropriate and automatic answering systems with Auto Attendant call options.

Government Directives are being issued to medical practices for ‘raising standards for patients in out of hours care’ which suggests upgrades to a practice’s telephone system to be able to record call conversations and provide after hours answering services. Business Telecom^cf are able to advise and implement upgrade programmes to meet these challenges.

Business Telecom^cf have installed many diverse telephone systems within the medical sector and the experience and knowledge the Company is able to share within the sector to new customers is often invaluable. With professional planning and consultancy before a system is specified, Business Telecom^cf ensures that any installation is scheduled to cause minimum disruption to the practice and its patients, with weekend installations often the preferred option.