Intelligent voice response services and solutions provider IVR Technology Group is now offering a second generation of MDCall. This feature-rich, cost-effective alternative to love-operator afterhours medical answering service, known as iAnswer, enables a highly accurate, consistent and reliable call experience for all patients.

IVR Technology Group's John Crouthamel said in a statement, "Medical practices are resigned to using answering services that are often expensive, prone to error, hard to reach, and sometimes, even unprofessional. Hardly surprising since most traditional answering services suffer from high operator turnover rates and overworked staff. Low automation in the industry also means a practice has to spend more time sending verbal and written communication and ensuring that instructions are met."

The new edition of iAnswer is designed to address such shortcomings as it offers a 99.9 percent first-ring answer rate and a predetermined call flow to ensure perfect handling of each call every time. In addition, the system knows if a message is picked up and will follow protocol when necessary to continue paging a provider or escalating the call.

The medical practice can configure how many pages should go out, identify receiving devices and individuals and even establish an order. If changes need to be made on-the-fly, they can be easily done without interrupting service.

Other benefits included with the iAnswer solution are designed to improve communications for all interactions. The system will keep a copy of each patient message for protection against liability. It also offers features like voicemail-by-email, Web-based on-call schedule management and mobile messaging.

The iAnswer solution will also allow the busy provider to have immediate control on their on-call contact settings. The doctor can change where they should be contacted whenever necessary. With this feature, if a provider damages or loses a pager, they can immediately change call alerts to their cell phone through the Web without needing to call an answer service.

“All this with one key benefit – an automated answering service is, hands-down, more cost-effective than a live-operator service,” said Akash Desai of IVR Technology Group. “iAnswer provides more services while costing much less than traditional live operator answering services.”

Earlier this summer, IVR Technologies (News - Alert) announced that its hosted interactive solutions now include SMS messaging. Company officials commented that they are excited to be able to offer SMS and they now believe the combination of their market expertise, proprietary technology, management and staff clearly creates a market leader in the interactive direct response marketing and Internet communication industries.