Overview

When you are in a call pool with other medical practices in your area, you likely will make use of On Call Central's covering provider feature. A covering provider is a special user type in On Call Central that allows you to send certain phone traffic to a colleague without requiring that user to be an On Call Central customer herself. Covering providers:

• Can be placed on the regular call schedule
• Can be used as part of a call schedule exception
• Do not have access to the On Call Central web, telephone, or mobile application
• Cannot be placed on the call schedule as a backup provider
• Cannot have backup providers when they are the primary person on call
• Currently do not cause you to incur any additional charges.

What Happens?

When a caller selects the option that normally would result in leaving a message for the on-call provider, the phone call instead is forwarded to the covering provider's office. Presumably, this provider has her own answering service which then would collect and pass along a message according to her preferences.

Benefits

There are several significant benefits of this setup:

• It is simple to drag a covering provider onto your call schedule, just like they are in your practice.
• Covering providers can continue to use their own answering service; they do not need to switch to On Call Central if they are not yet ready.
• Since the originating call passes through On Call Central, we will maintain documentation of the call, allowing you to have an appropriate follow-up with your patients, even if your colleague neglects to inform you about the call.

To create a covering provider, please submit a support ticket, and we will be happy to assist.