In Part 1 of this topic, I discussed the key issue your practice must resolve before purchasing a phone system: what are your needs? Now let’s review the questions you need to ask yourself and why they are so important:

1. How many people and devices need to be on the phone at one time? Don’t forget that voice calls are not the only things which tie up your phone lines. Take an inventory of any peripheral devices which could possibly be in use concurrently with your staff: modems, fax or postage machines, credit card machines, or your security system.
2. How many calls at each location do you need to receive at one time? You don’t want to limit the number of lines you have and then have patients unable to get through. This will also help you determine if you need to have an actual call center set up. (more…)

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When I first joined our group about 11 years ago (jeez, it’s been almost 12 years!) we had some 80 or so employees and a big collection of PC computers connected in a patchwork of a network – not exactly state-of-the-art. Our phone system, however, was relatively sophisticated – or so we thought. A multi-line phone system with several custom features and a message-on-hold device. What we didn’t realize until much later was that we were paying for each and every line coming into the building as well as for each and every custom feature on each and every one of those individual phone lines.

Another drawback to this type of system is that the staff needs to keep track of multiple phone numbers – this can get chaotic when you start adding multiple locations. If you needed to get hold of a particular doctor, for example, first you would need to find out where he or she is (more…)

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