Automated prescription ordering by phone: More time for your patients
Are recipe orders by phone tying up staff in your practice? Learn how to easily automate this process and gain more time for patient care.
The phone is ringing – yet another prescription request
In every doctor's office, the phone is the most important connection to the patients. But it is also one of the biggest sources of constant interruptions. A significant portion of daily calls revolves around a single, recurring task: ordering a repeat prescription.
Each of these calls, no matter how brief, interrupts your medical assistants (MFA) in their work. They have to leave a patient waiting at the reception, interrupt a billing process, or rush out of the preparation of a treatment room – just to collect information that is always the same: name, date of birth, medication. This flood of routine tasks ties up valuable resources that are urgently needed elsewhere: in caring for patients on-site.
The classic answering machine: A well-intentioned but error-prone solution
Many practices have set up a separate answering machine for prescription requests. However, in practice, this often leads to new problems:
Incomplete information: Names are slurred, the date of birth for clear identification is missing, or the medication is barely understandable.
High manual effort: Your staff still has to listen to the tapes at fixed times, painstakingly write down the information, and check for completeness. The time gained is minimal.
No dialogue: The patient receives no confirmation as to whether their order was successful or if there are any follow-up questions.
The classic mailbox simply shifts the problem rather than truly solving it.
The solution: A digital assistant for structured orders
Imagine your patients could order prescriptions around the clock without your practice phone ringing even once. And your team would receive a clean, error-free to-do list instead of countless calls and unclear voicemail messages.
That is exactly what an automated, dialog-controlled process achieves. An intelligent phone assistant, such as Safina, can be set up to handle the task of prescription ordering completely autonomously. The process looks like this:
Targeted conversation leading: A patient calling for a prescription is recognized by the system and guided into a structured dialogue.
Systematic data collection: The assistant asks for all necessary information clearly and understandably: "Please state your full name now", "Please spell your last name", "Please tell me your date of birth now", "What medication and what dosage do you need?".
Automated task list: All collected data is converted into a perfectly formatted written message and sent to an email address you specify or directly into your practice management system (PVS).
Your team simply works through a clear list in the morning, without spending a single minute answering calls. The error rate decreases dramatically, efficiency increases, and the atmosphere at the reception becomes noticeably calmer – because your MFAs can fully concentrate on the people standing in front of them.
