Whether you're running a busy hospital, a doctor’s office, or a medical institute, a good VoIP system can help a ton with talking to people. VoIP systems have great sound and work well for healthcare, making sure all the important calls are clear and don't cut out.
With special tools made just for healthcare, VoIP stands out as a great choice for doctors and nurses. But there are so many choices out there, it can be hard to pick.
But don't worry – our guide is here to help. We've checked out the best VoIP systems for healthcare and can tell you which ones are best for your practice. We'll help you find the VoIP system that will make talking in your office super easy and fit your needs just right.
Our Top 5 Best VoIP Providers for Medical Offices and Health Care:
- Vonage Business - Best Voip provider for medical offices and health care overall
- RingCentral - Best for unlimited texting
- 8x8 - Best for uptime
- Grasshopper - Best for unlimited extensions
- GoToConnect (Jive) - Best for unlimited local and long distance
A Closer Look at Our 5 Best VoIP Providers for Medical Offices - Reviews:
1. Vonage Business
Vonage Business is one of the best VoIP providers for medical institutes and hospitals.
Some of the main features of Vonage Business include:
- A powerful mobile app that integrates directly with the Vonage Business account so that doctors and medical staff can make and receive business calls from their smartphone from within the app.
- Multiple integrations with 3rd-party apps enable better synchronization of patient information. A cloud-based model means that doctors can access full patient information from any device so that they can be fully informed when they answer patient questions from anywhere.
- An auto attendant (called a ‘virtual assistant’ by Vonage Business) that routes calls to the right individual or to an entire department.
- Group paging – also known as hunt group – so that medical administrators can contact multiple personnel at once.
- Video conferencing, call bridging, and audio conference calls for better communications and knowledge sharing.
- Voicemail support including voicemail to email.
Why we chose Vonage: Vonage Business offers significant cost savings compared to traditional phone systems. With Vonage Business, hospitals can save an average of 36% on call costs. This cost efficiency is crucial for healthcare organizations that need to optimize their budgets while maintaining high-quality communication services.
2. RingCentral
RingCentral is another leading VoIP provider with many features that are vital for hospitals and medical institutes. It already serves over 350,000 businesses thanks to the extensive features, sophisticated PBX solution, and easy scalability.
Some of the key features of RingCentral for hospitals and medical institutes include:
- An effective mobile app that allows doctors to receive and make calls on their smartphones so that they can respond to patients even when away from their desks.
- Unlimited video conferencing and audio conference calls to encourage greater collaboration between medical personnel.
- Easily scalable for doctors’ practices and medical centers that intend to expand.
- Excellent customer support that helps solve user issues quickly to reduce downtime.
- Call trees and call routing that makes sure that every patient who calls is answered by the most appropriate person for their situation.
- Hunt groups–group calls–to alert several doctors to a situation or pass on important messages all at the same time.
- Easy setup and system management so that even small medical centers that don’t have a dedicated IT department can utilize the system.
Why we chose RingCentral: RingCentral integrates with popular healthcare systems and applications, allowing for seamless synchronization of patient information and streamlined workflows. This integration enables medical offices to access patient records, appointment schedules, and other critical data directly from the RingCentral platform, improving efficiency and accuracy in patient care.
Read the full RingCental review
3. 8x8
As a hosted cloud-based VoIP provider, 8x8 is another popular option for medical institutes and hospitals of all sizes. 8x8 charges reasonable rates and includes many useful features.
Some of the main advantages to using 8x8 include:
- A very easy to set up and operate VoIP system which can be managed without difficulty, even by medical staff with little IT experience, ideal for small practices without an IT department.
- Multiple 3rd-party app integrations to allow seamless connection with tools that include Outlook, Smartoffice, and NetSuite, so that medical practitioners can access patient details and extended caller ID no matter where they receive the call.
- Video conferencing to promote collaboration and knowledge sharing.
- Fax-to-email capabilities.
- Voicemail-to-email feature that makes it easier to keep up with voice messages, especially at busy times.
- Ring groups to transfer a call to multiple extensions at the same time, so as to increase the chances that it will be answered.
- Auto attendant that handles initial calls and redirects them to the relevant extension.
- Handy mobile app that enables medical staff to make and receive professional calls from within the app.
Why we chose 8x8: 8x8 is a highly secure VoIP system. Patient data is fully encrypted and personal information is safe from hackers and cyberthieves. Medical personnel can chat securely so as to collaborate on difficult cases.
4. Grasshopper
Grasshopper offers an affordable call answering solution with various features suitable for the healthcare business, making it ideal for smaller medical centers and doctors' practices. Although it doesn't provide outbound calls like traditional VoIP providers, Grasshopper still offers essential features that are beneficial for hospitals and medical institutes.
Here are the key features offered by Grasshopper:
- Cost-effective pricing plans that eliminate the need for additional hardware, saving money for small medical practices.
- Simple setup and call management, allowing even practices without an IT department to easily establish and maintain the system.
- Easy call transfer and call routing capabilities ensure seamless access to medical practitioners and staff members.
- Find me/follow me functionality enables doctors to receive important calls from patients and colleagues, even when they are away from their desk or at a different location.
- Voicemail-to-email feature delivers both voicemail recordings and transcriptions, helping medical practitioners stay on top of important voice messages.
- Fax reception as emails ensures vital information is not lost within the fax system.
Grasshopper's call answering solution offers these features to support smaller medical practices, providing efficient and cost-effective communication solutions.
Why we chose Grasshopper: Grasshopper's standout Auto Attendant functionality handles calls outside of working hours and directs callers to the appropriate individuals or departments, preventing frustration for patients and employees.
Read the full Grasshopper review
5. GoToConnect (Jive)
GoToConnect is a hosted VoIP provider that offers a user-friendly setup and management process, making it an excellent choice for small medical practices without IT staff. Here are the key features of GoToConnect:
- Voicemail-to-Email: The Voicemail-to-Email feature delivers voice messages as email attachments, allowing physicians to conveniently stay updated with their voicemail while managing their emails.
- Easy Setup and Maintenance: GoToConnect offers an extremely user-friendly platform that can be easily set up and maintained, even by medical practitioners with no prior IT experience. It simplifies call handling for efficient communication.
- Find Me and Follow Me: This capability ensures that important calls from colleagues and patients are promptly answered by the right person, even when they are away from their desk. It helps maintain accessibility and responsiveness.
- Unlimited Direct Integrations: GoToConnect allows unlimited direct integrations, including accessing patient details from any device. This empowers doctors to provide informed opinions and answers over the phone, enhancing the quality of patient care.
- Conference Bridge: The conference bridge feature enables conference calls with up to 10 participants, promoting better collaboration among medical professionals.
- Unlimited Auto Attendants: GoToConnect offers unlimited auto attendants, ensuring calls are efficiently directed to the right destination every time, enhancing caller experience.
- Time-Based Routing and Custom Schedules: With time-based routing and custom schedules, GoToConnect covers every time of the year, including weekends, holidays, and early closing days. This feature enables effective call handling based on specific time requirements.
GoToConnect's user-friendly features and functionalities make it an attractive choice for small medical practices seeking a reliable and efficient VoIP solution.
Why we chose GoToConnect: GoToConnect provides a robust mobile app that enables medical practitioners to handle calls from anywhere. The app allows for split calls, location-based rule calls, conference calls, chat functionality, and blind and warm transfers. In general, the VoIP provider allows for streamlined mobility and seamless communication - making it the best VoIP for medical teams on the move.
Read the full GoToConnect (Jive) Review
How is VoIP Used in Healthcare?
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become an integral technology in the healthcare sector, revolutionizing the way medical institutions communicate both internally and with their patients.
The adoption of VoIP in healthcare is part of a broader trend towards digitalization and smart technologies in medical settings. A notable example of this trend is the increasing deployment of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices in smart hospitals. A study by Juniper Research found that smart hospitals are expected to deploy over 7.4 million connected IoMT devices globally by 2026, representing a total growth of 131% from 2021.
This substantial increase in connected medical devices, including remote monitoring sensors and surgical robotics, underscores the growing importance of advanced communication technologies like VoIP in enhancing patient care, staff productivity, and operational efficiency in healthcare settings. Here are some of the many ways that VoIP is utilized in healthcare:
Enhanced Patient Communication: VoIP enables patients to easily reach their healthcare providers, improving access to medical advice and reducing wait times. This is particularly beneficial for remote or telehealth consultations, where patients can receive care from the comfort of their homes.
Internal Collaboration: Medical staff can communicate more effectively within the institution, regardless of their physical location. VoIP facilitates quick discussions, consults, and decision-making among doctors, nurses, and administrative staff, which is crucial for patient care and emergency responses.
Integration with Medical Systems: VoIP can be integrated with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and other healthcare management systems. This allows for seamless access to patient data during calls, improving the efficiency and accuracy of medical consultations and record-keeping.
Cost-Effective Communication Solution: By replacing traditional phone lines, VoIP reduces operational costs. It allows healthcare facilities to manage their communication expenses better through affordable monthly plans and reduced need for physical infrastructure.
Flexible Call Handling: Features like call routing, find me/follow me, and group paging ensure that calls are never missed and are directed to the right person or department, enhancing the overall management of patient inquiries and internal communication.
Secure and Compliant Communication: With robust encryption and security protocols, VoIP ensures that patient data and conversations remain confidential, complying with regulations like HIPAA in the U.S.
Remote Work Capability for Healthcare Professionals: VoIP supports remote work for medical staff, allowing them to communicate effectively with colleagues and patients from any location, which is particularly useful in situations like home-based care or during travel.
Training and Education: VoIP technology is also used for training healthcare professionals through virtual workshops, seminars, and collaborative learning sessions, making ongoing education more accessible.
Who is the Best VoIP Provider for Healthcare and Hospitals?
Our pick for the best VoIP provider for medical offices is 8x8. 8x8 offers services channeled through a single app that works consistently on desktop, mobile, and in-browser. It comes with unlimited inbound and outbound calling in 47 countries, call recording and conferencing features.
Pricing starts at just $12/user/month, which is significantly lower than most competing brands. This makes 8x8 one of the best phone systems for small medical offices and an excellent VoIP system for healthcare providers in general.
8x8 seamlessly integrates with most popular business software, such as Salesforce, Netsuite, and Zendesk. If your hospital has a commonly used customer relationship management (CRM) program, you can integrate it easily with 8x8, saving you time and money.
Perhaps most critically, 8x8 is designed from the ground up to be HIPAA-compliant. Some providers can customize their services to be HIPAA-compliant—often at extra cost—but 8x8 is one of the few VoIP providers designed to comply with HIPAA by default.
What are the Benefits of VoIP for Medical Institutes and Hospitals?
VoIP systems are invaluable for healthcare institutions, offering enhanced communication that facilitates better patient care and improved medical collaboration.
With VoIP, patients can quickly contact their healthcare providers, reducing wait times and the frustration of dropped calls. This improved communication not only strengthens the trust between patients and doctors but also allows for remote consultations, decreasing the necessity for in-person visits.
Additionally, VoIP enables more effective collaboration among medical professionals, fostering greater knowledge sharing and clearer decision-making, which is crucial for accurate diagnoses and treatment plans. Furthermore, the best VoIP services for hospitals are designed with robust security features, including built-in encryption, to safeguard sensitive medical information discussed during calls.
The scalability of cloud-based VoIP systems is also a significant advantage for healthcare providers, allowing easy adjustments to phone services as per the changing needs without the hassle of managing extensive hardware.
Important VoIP Features for Medical Institutes and Hospitals
VoIP technology offers a range of features that are particularly beneficial for healthcare institutions, enhancing both operational efficiency and patient satisfaction. Key features include:
Auto-Attendant/Virtual Assistant: This feature efficiently handles incoming calls, ensuring patients are directed to the appropriate personnel even when staff is unavailable.
Fax-to-Email: This allows medical centers to receive and respond to faxes without the need for a physical fax machine, streamlining document management.
Enhanced Security: Encryption and other security measures are crucial for protecting patient confidentiality and enabling secure remote collaboration among medical professionals.
Voicemail to Email: Voicemails are converted to emails, either as voice recordings or transcribed texts, improving response times to patient inquiries.
Find Me/Follow Me: This feature ensures that calls reach doctors or medical staff regardless of their location, whether they are in different clinics or away from their desks.
Call Routing: Advanced call routing capabilities allow for calls to be efficiently transferred between departments or to various extensions, enhancing patient service and reducing wait times. It includes a hierarchy system where calls are directed to the most appropriate department first, ensuring higher chances of call pickup.
Group Paging: This enables mass announcements across multiple telephones simultaneously, crucial for rapid communication in emergencies or for general announcements.
Analytics and Reporting: VoIP systems come with built-in analytics tools, unlike traditional phone lines. These tools help in analyzing call volumes, identifying peak times, and understanding call handling efficiency. This data is invaluable for strategic decisions regarding staffing and customer service improvements.
A Closer Look at The Most Essential VoIP Features for Hospitals
The various features of a VoIP phone system for healthcare can save you money and cut costs relative to a traditional phone line. Let’s take a look at three of the most essential features of a VoIP phone service for hospitals.
Call Routing
With VoIP, you can route calls through multiple hospital departments. For instance, callers can select a reason for their call and be routed automatically to the correct department with an automatic receptionist. If that department is unavailable, you can program the call to shift to the next most appropriate department automatically.
You can use this to create a hierarchy for calls. For example, calls will go to the desired department first, then to a different one equipped to handle the overflow, then to any department that is not busy, then finally to the general reception desk, where they will go to voicemail if still not picked up. This system increases the odds of someone picking up the call, improving patient satisfaction.
Follow Me/Find Me
Consider a small medical office with two to three physicians. These doctors could be in their offices, in a room with a patient, or out of the office with only their cell phones available. The best VoIP systems for medical offices provide follow me/find me services. For each physician, you can set up a sequence of locations to route a call through.
For example, calls for a particular doctor may go to their office first, then to the phone in the room where they commonly see patients, then to their cell phone, then finally to the general reception desk. It is also possible to implement this system at a larger hospital with some work.
Having follow me/find me in place improves patient satisfaction. People calling for a specific doctor are more likely to reach that physician rather than a receptionist or a customer service representative.
Analytics and Reporting
Programs that offer VoIP for healthcare providers are a special form of contact center software. As such, they come with built-in reporting and analytics tools while traditional phone lines do not. You can use these tools to measure incoming call volume throughout the day, how many calls get dropped vs. how many get through to their destination, the number of voicemails coming in each day, and more.
While most hospitals already know their busiest times of day for patient intake, the same cannot always be said for incoming calls. You can use analytics to find out peak times for incoming calls and hire some part-time reception staff during those hours. You can also find out if your team are successfully taking the majority of calls or if a large number are being dropped or going to voicemail.
This information is helpful for many strategic decisions made by hiring managers and customer service teams.
How Can VoIP Help Medical Institutes and Hospitals Cut Costs
How VoIP is Changing Medical Institutes and Hospitals
Along with other cutting-edge technology, VoIP is part of a wave of change in medical institutes and hospitals. Secure cloud-based VoIP communications mean that doctors can access full patient data immediately, no matter where they are or where the data was originally gathered. As reliability has increased, VoIP solutions are able to provide communications services that have barely any downtime, lower latency, and better sound quality.
Follow me, call transfer, and call routing features mean that hospitals can leave behind the frustration of not being able to contact a given doctor or nurse because he/she is not at their desk. Better virtual communication also enables doctors and other medical practitioners to meet to share knowledge, discuss difficult cases, and prepare case studies much more frequently, which raises the standard of medicine everywhere.
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Serguei Solokhine writes for Top10.com, covering finance, business, and travel. A digital nomad with degrees in finance and marketing and five years in financial services, he brings strong expertise in personal finance, marketing, CRM tools, and SaaS platforms.
