Why Therapists need to separate their phone number from their private practice
Why Therapist need to separate the phone number from their private practice
Many therapists use their cell phone number to communicate with their clients. This, besides not being HIPAA compliant, is a limitation and causes interruptions in your personal life. You don’t necessarily need a second phone device; just an additional phone number would do. It will help you differentiate your private calls and messages from your clients’ calls and messages. The following reasons explain why you should have boundaries between your business and personal phone number:
Maintaining Business Hours
Using the same phone number for work and personal purposes becomes hectic and you might end up missing out in life. If you do not separate your cellphone number from your business number, I can guarantee you that you will fail to differentiate between personal and professional calls. You might answer the call "unprofessionally" because you don't know who it is. Or you end up working outside your business hours, causing you to not be present during your family time. This happens when you end up taking a client’s phone call during off-hours. Getting a business phone number enables you to easily differentiate your calls and maintain your business hours as you can avoid clients’ phone calls during your off-hours.
2. It helps you to have control over your phone
If you are using an app like Phone.com to separate your cell phone and business number, you can set up schedules so that business calls go straight to voicemail once you are ready to disconnect from work. If you want to avoid getting personal calls during work hours, you could set your private number to “Do not Disturb” and use your business number only to avoid distractions. The same goes for whenever you have off days or you are on vacation. It helps keep your schedule in place and avoid mixing your work life with your private life.
3. You can customize your phone into various features
With a different business phone number, you can set up an auto-attendant feature which is helpful when you are not in a position to receive a call. You can also have the option of forwarding calls to other people, such as your virtual assistant, when you are not available. You can choose to customize greetings for your clients to convey any message you want. If you have a billing department you can set up an extension so that clients that have billing questions go to your biller rather than you. Service providers such as Phone.com can offer the above features and much more. It does not require any hardware and has an app that can be launched on both Android and iOS. No contracts are available, and therefore you are not forced to continue with them if you are not satisfied. Experts are available 24/7 to provide help if there is a problem with the app.
Therapists in private practice face a lot of challenges while doing their work. One of the challenges they face is balancing their professional life and personal life. Balancing life and work is vital for a therapist but also hard to do. Nonetheless, it is not unachievable. You may find yourself spending too much time attending to your patients which can lead to neglecting other important aspects of your life, such as your family. The following are tips for balancing life and work:
Analyze your schedule: You should analyze when you are most productive. Place your meetings during the most productive period. It would be best if you also changed your schedule to fit in your personal life. This ensures flexibility to do whatever you want out of your private practice.
Take time off: You should alter your schedule to fit in vacations. This will help in reducing the stress that is acquired through work.
Have a journal: This will ensure long-term stress relief and, therefore, enable peace between work and life. You should write things you are appreciative of from both your work and life in your journal. When you are having a bad day, you can go through the notes to remind you of what is important.
Outsourcing some of your dreaded work: It will make your work more enjoyable and improve your working interest. It also reduces stress and increases your creativity.
Therapists have a lot of work to do which brings about a lot of challenges. By using a HIPAA compliant business phone number, such as phone.com, you are setting that first boundary between your work and personal phone calls. If you use my affiliate link HERE! plus the code PDC21CJ21 will get 20% off the first 3 months, just click HERE!
