Ditch the legacy phone system in your medical clinic

Many hospitals and medical clinics are moving to Microsoft Teams Phone for their incoming and outgoing calls.

For community care clinics, medical office assistants typically are working at their desktop, booking appointments and answering inquiries with the clinic’s EMR open in front of them. If software phone technology is available, reliable and allows you to receive and make phone calls from anywhere in the world, why not make the move to a piece of software rather than old school handsets?

Legacy phone networks are on the way out. It’s harder and harder to find replacement pieces for failed hardware for the old PBX systems.

MS Teams Phone is able to integrate with a simple API which is a piece of software to connect your EMR to MS Teams so that you can see who is calling and in some applications will pull up that patient’s EMR file. There is additional integration functionality available above and beyond this, but is dependent upon each EMR vendor so check with yours.

The “pros”:

  • You still need several phone lines, but at a much lower monthly rate
  • No more hardware. Hardware is expensive to replace and eventually becomes outdated and takes up real estate on your already limited exam room countertop.
  • MS Teams Phone can be used on any platform (Android or IOS) and any hardware (smartphone, iPads, tablets or PCs)
  • You can tell who is available for a call or on a call so that you don’t have to bother them
  • Call record and transcription
  • PHIPA compliant
  • Chat with other users on your Team.
  • Voicemail and IVR phone tree can be set up seamlessly and EASILY
  • Call routing can be changed on a “dime” and according to your preferences. For example, in larger clinics, calls can be routed to staff in a sequential order, randomly, if one is busy on a call, can be sent to another employee, or calls can be routed to medical office assistants based on total volumes throughout the day to even out the calls.
  • MS Teams Phone is compatible with several types of headsets as well.
  • Staff can book appointments and work remotely. No expensive hardware to maintain.

There are no “cons”, other than trying to persuade staff and physicians to get onboard.

This blog just touches on the functionality available through MS Teams. Connect with us and we can point you in the right direction.