The Path to Paperless

Choosing the Best Phone System

Make a checklist of your needs before deciding.

By Peter J. Polack, M.D., F.A.C.S.

Most physicians take their phone systems for granted. Typically, when someone "hangs their shingle," the decision on which telephone system to install in the new office is left up to the local phone company. And this is probably sufficient for most solo or small practices. They would just need to have two or three phone lines patched into the building and hooked up to a small multi-line office phone setup. They could then just add a message-on-hold device, activated when the caller is placed on hold, and be ready for business.

Add several lines (or another location) and that's when things can get real interesting — and potentially expensive — when you start adding up the monthly service charges on all of the telephone lines.

Things get really complicated when your practice has multiple locations. Up to a certain point it may seem to make sense to have multi-line business phone systems in each location, each with its own primary phone number.

This is what we had until recently. But this type of setup can be quite chaotic when your staff needs to memorize several different main phone numbers and their associated private back-line numbers. If you need to reach a certain physician, for instance, first you would need to read a schedule telling you where that physician was working and then find the number for that particular location. If it was a satellite location and all the phone lines were tied up (another issue), then you would need to look up the private back line number for that office.

In addition to the chaos, reactively expanding telecommunication services can be unnecessarily expensive and, in the long-term, end up wasting money. To avoid this trap, start with a plan. Sit down and figure out exactly what your phone needs are, for today and the foreseeable future. A little forethought and answering a few simple questions will help you to select both the correct phone service (where the dial tone is coming from) and the correct phone system.

Determining Your Needs

► How many people and devices at each location need to be on the phone at one time? Don't forget to include your fax machines, modems, credit card machines, postage machine, security system and fire alarm systems.

► How many calls at each location do you need to receive at one time?

► How many phone numbers, both public and internal, do you need?

► How many physical phones do you need at each location?

► Do you need call accounting? (The ability to track and report on incoming and outgoing calls.)

► Do you have a call center for patient appointment scheduling? If so, do you need contact center features, like ACD (automated call distribution) and operator reporting/monitoring?

► Which features are important to your business? Transferring a call to another location? Caller ID, both inbound and outbound? Voicemail? Call forwarding, probably to an answering service?

In the next article, I'll show you how to use the answers to these questions to select the phone service and phone system that's right for you. OM

Next: Part 2: Choosing a phone system.