About MASO

Forty years of doing one thing. We’re still getting better at it.

Medical Answering Service of Oregon has provided medical-only call handling since 1986. We haven’t diversified into general call center work. We haven’t been acquired by a national rollup. In 40 years, we have never lost a client over service quality. We’re locally owned, employee-staffed, and still run by someone who knows every client relationship by name.

That’s not a legacy pitch. It’s a track record.

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Medical-only since 1986 • Locally owned and operated • Employee-staffed • Never lost a client over service quality in 40 years • 24/7/365 coverage • HIPAA-compliant operations

What we’re built on

The night that told us exactly what we were capable of.

A large women’s health network — ten locations, more than ninety providers, thousands of patients — suddenly found themselves without after-hours call coverage. No warning. No transition period. Patients who needed to reach their care team after hours had no way to do it.

They called us.

We had that organization functional in less than a day. Fully onboarded within three days. Every escalation rule, every provider preference, every on-call schedule — documented and live while their team was still processing what had just happened.

We don’t tell that story to impress you. We tell it because it’s the clearest demonstration of what it means to have an answering service that actually knows what it’s doing. When it mattered most, for an organization that had never worked with us before, under circumstances that couldn’t have been more urgent, we delivered. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to on an ordinary Tuesday in March.

Ten locations

Every location configured, every routing rule documented, before a single call came through.

More than ninety providers

Every provider preference collected, every escalation path built, in less than a day.

Functional in under 24 hours

Patients could reach their care team. Providers were reachable. The gap in coverage closed.

Fully onboarded in three days

Not just functional — complete. Every detail in place, every workflow refined.

Who we are

Locally owned. Employee-staffed. Medical-only. Here’s what those mean in practice.

Locally owned

MASO ownership and operators are in Portland, Oregon. When something needs to change, there’s no corporate escalation path, no regional manager to loop in, no ticket system that routes your concern to a queue. There’s a decision-maker who knows your account and can act on it.

For the organizations watching nationals acquire regional services and fold them into standardized infrastructure — we’re the alternative. Not because scale is bad, but because the thing that makes MASO valuable to a practice with complex workflows and specific provider preferences is precisely the thing that gets standardized away in that model.

Employee-staffed

Every operator who answers your calls is a MASO employee. Not a contractor. Not an outsourced agent in a shared call center environment. An employee who has been trained on your account, handles your call types regularly, and has enough institutional knowledge that when a provider calls back at midnight asking about a message from three hours ago, someone knows exactly what they’re talking about.

Operator turnover is one of the silent killers of answering service quality. Our operators stay. Some have been handling the same client accounts for decades. Our average length of service is over ten years. That continuity shows up in every call.

Medical-only

We don’t handle restaurant reservations, property management calls, or retail customer service. We handle medical calls — and only medical calls. That means our operators understand clinical terminology, recognize the difference between call types that require immediate escalation and those that don’t, and approach patient communication with the baseline competency that healthcare requires.

An operator who handles a pediatric after-hours call the same way they’d handle a complaint about a delayed package isn’t just unhelpful. In a clinical context, they’re a liability.

How we operate

The things we believe about this work — and why they show up in how we do it.

We learn your workflow before we touch your calls

Every account starts with a thorough documentation process — provider contact preferences, escalation rules, urgent call criteria, on-call schedules, location-specific instructions, specialty-specific call types. We ask a lot of questions upfront because the alternative is making assumptions that cost someone a good night’s sleep or, worse, affect patient care.

We don’t send patient messages through unencrypted channels

No SMS. No unencrypted email. Every message delivery method we use — secure messaging app, encrypted email, fax, pager, phone, or the MASO Connect platform — is appropriate for patient-related communication. This isn’t a compliance checkbox. It’s a basic standard that more services than you’d expect don’t meet.

We tell you when something goes wrong

Every service has a difficult night eventually. Our standard is to surface problems proactively, not wait to be asked. If something happened on your account overnight that you should know about, you hear it from us — not from a provider who’s already frustrated.

We’re building toward what this industry needs next

Epic integration is in active development. MASO Connect — our secure, real-time communication platform for staff, providers, and administrators — is now available to new clients. Nurse triage coordination through a national triage partner is available for organizations that need RN-supported patient guidance. We’re not standing still, and neither is the industry.

The clients who stay

In 40 years, we have never lost a client over service quality. Here’s the honest version of what that means.

Some clients have left. Practices close. Physicians retire. Organizations get acquired by health systems that mandate a different vendor. A handful over the years chose a less expensive service, discovered the difference in quality, and came back.

What has never happened is a client leaving because we failed them. No missed calls that ended the relationship. No service disruptions we couldn’t explain. No providers complaining loudly enough that the practice manager decided enough was enough.

That record exists because of how accounts are set up, how operators are trained, how escalation protocols are built, and how seriously we take the idea that after-hours calls aren’t an inconvenience to be managed — they’re the moment when a patient is most vulnerable and a provider’s time is most valuable.

Some of our original clients are still with us. That’s not a coincidence.

Forty years of relationships

Some of our original clients are still with us. Long-term relationships don’t happen with a service that isn’t working.

Never lost a client over service quality

Clients have left for other reasons — retirement, acquisition, price. Never because we let them down.

Word of mouth is our primary growth channel

We’ve grown steadily for decades with no advertising. That’s what a track record looks like in practice.

Praise from providers and office staff alike

The people who interact with MASO day to day — providers, administrators, front desk staff — are the ones who tell their colleagues about us.

Security & compliance

HIPAA-compliant operations aren’t a differentiator. They’re a prerequisite.

We sign BAAs with clients and applicable vendors as standard practice. Staff receive annual HIPAA and PHI handling training through a certified compliance service. Message records are retained for at least seven years and backed up through encrypted datacenter and cloud storage. We use only secure delivery channels for patient-related communication.

We mention this not because it’s impressive but because a surprising number of services don’t meet this standard — and healthcare organizations often don’t find out until something goes wrong.

BAAs

Signed with clients and applicable vendors. Standard, not optional.

Annual training

HIPAA and PHI handling, certified annually through a compliance service.

Secure delivery only

Every channel we use for patient-related messages is appropriate for that content. No SMS. No unencrypted email.

Seven-year retention

Message records backed up through encrypted datacenter and cloud storage.

FAQ

About MASO

How long has MASO been in operation?

Since 1986. Forty years of medical-only call handling — not forty years of general call center work with a healthcare division added later. The entire history of this company is medical communication.

Is MASO locally owned?

Yes. MASO is owned and operated in Portland, Oregon. That means decisions get made by someone who knows the business, knows the clients, and has a direct stake in the quality of the service. There’s no parent company, no regional VP, no acquisition to answer to.

Are your operators employees?

Yes. Every operator is a MASO employee. No outsourced contractors, no shared call center arrangements. Our operators are trained on specific client accounts and handle those accounts consistently enough to build real institutional knowledge over time.

What makes MASO different from the national answering services?

Scale and standardization are the national model — growth by acquisition and consolidation into centralized infrastructure. The efficiency gains are real. So is the loss of account-specific depth. MASO’s model is the opposite: we stay focused enough to know every client’s workflow and build enough institutional knowledge that the service actually improves over time, rather than getting more generic.

Is MASO adding new services?

Yes. Epic integration is in active development. MASO Connect — a secure, real-time communication platform for staff, providers, and administrators — is now available to new clients. Nurse triage coordination through a national triage partner is available for organizations that need RN-supported patient guidance. We’re expanding capabilities deliberately, not chasing every new thing in the industry.

What is MASO Connect?

MASO Connect is a HIPAA-compliant communication platform now available to new MASO clients. It provides real-time secure messaging between front desk staff, administrators, providers, and the MASO answering service — multi-directional, encrypted in transit and at rest, with 2FA required and accessible anywhere around the clock. On-call schedule management is also available through the platform. A dedicated page with full details is coming soon.

If you’ve been burned by a service that couldn’t do what it said it could, we understand why you’re skeptical. We’d rather show you the track record than ask you to take our word for it.

Forty years. Never lost a client over service quality in 40 years. An emergency onboarding that had a ten-location women’s health network functional in less than a day.

That’s not a marketing claim. It’s what we’ve done. Request a consultation and we’ll have an honest conversation about whether MASO is the right fit for your organization.

We’re not the right fit for everyone. We’re very much the right fit for healthcare organizations that want a communication partner who takes this as seriously as they do.

Request a Consultation Call 503-238-8219