The healthcare industry is one of the sectors most prone to stress and burnout. In fact, a study by the American Medical Association shows that 28% of doctors and clinicians are unhappy with their jobs, a higher percentage than the previous year’s study.
Due to staff shortages and the growing number of patients, medical professionals are often stuck juggling patient care with administrative tasks.
But they don’t have to be!
Hiring a healthcare virtual assistant is now the go-to cost-effective solution to this pressing problem.
As game-changers in the healthcare industry, virtual medical assistants now take on the administrative burden that has been affecting the performance and job satisfaction of medical professionals.
Read on to learn more about how virtual medical assistants upgrade your practice, including their benefits, key roles, and tips for finding your own assistant.
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What is a healthcare virtual assistant?
A healthcare virtual assistant is just like any skilled virtual assistant, except they focus on supporting healthcare providers and practices.
Many medical professionals are unable to focus on patient satisfaction since they’re also burdened with administrative tasks. A virtual health assistant changes this dynamic by stepping and taking over these duties and more.
Virtual assistants also work remotely, making them a cost-effective alternative to hiring in-house staff.
What are the responsibilities of a healthcare virtual assistant?
Here are the main responsibilities of a healthcare virtual assistant:
Providing medication or prescription refills
Managing medical records
Answering patients’ questions and inquiries
Promptly scheduling and managing appointments
Taking care of insurance verification
What are the top benefits of having your own healthcare virtual assistant?
Patient satisfaction is a top priority in the healthcare industry. And the best way to achieve this? Getting your own virtual medical assistant!
Apart from relieving physicians and other medical professionals of their administrative duties, these virtual assistants bring many more benefits to your practice.
Let’s talk more about it.
A higher standard of patient care
Healthcare professionals should be able to focus more on their patients, and they can do this by delegating their paperwork and administrative tasks to a virtual assistant.
Doctors can then achieve better interactions with their patients and can provide more accurate diagnoses and plans for treatment.
Lower operational costs
If you think simply hiring in-house staff can solve your administrative issues, you should also consider how costly it can be.
Hiring an in-house staff means providing benefits, office space, and equipment on top of their full-time salaries.
On the other hand, you can save money when you outsource to a healthcare virtual assistant! This lowers your costs since you won’t need to cover the typical operational expenses of hiring a full-time staff.
Increased operational efficiency
Medical virtual assistants are experts in their line of job. With minimal training from you, they can quickly learn the ropes and perform their duties accurately.
Being this efficient in their workload significantly improves the operations of your practice by removing any delays and bottlenecks.
24/7 service and availability
Healthcare virtual assistants work remotely, which means they can be located anywhere in different time zones.
Having a virtual assistant from another part of the world helps you easily fill in those out-of-hour shifts and provide quality service to your patients beyond standard working hours.
Flexibility in services
The demand for administrative services entirely depends on how booming your practice currently is.
Since the demand fluctuates from time to time, being able to scale the services depending on what you need at the moment is best. And this is where virtual medical assistants come in!
Virtual medical assistants offer the flexibility to scale their services up or down depending on your needs. It doesn’t matter if you need them for only a few hours or a full-time shift – an assistant will be ready to help.
Diverse talent pool
If your practice only hires locally, you might miss out on skills or talents unavailable in your area. This makes it more challenging to find the perfect healthcare assistant.
Instead of restricting yourself to what’s available, you can hire a virtual medical assistant from anywhere in the world. Hiring remote workers gives you access to global talents to provide the best possible service to your patients.
Healthcare-specific skills
Your assistant should be an expert in administrative duties, tech-savvy, and knowledgeable about the healthcare industry.
Luckily, healthcare virtual assistants excel in these exact areas. These virtual medical assistants underwent specialized training, such as a HIPAA training program, and can effortlessly integrate technology into your current practice.
How can healthcare virtual assistants transform your practice?
Now that you understand the different advantages of having a virtual medical assistant, let’s discuss how they can actually help you on a daily basis.
The right virtual assistant can transform your practice in these different ways:
Streamlined administrative tasks
I believe we can all agree that healthcare practices are quite busy environments loaded with administrative tasks.
As long as you have healthcare virtual assistants, you don’t need to worry about these tasks piling up! These experts can perform your administrative duties without any hand-holding, so clinical staff can focus on their work without concerning themselves with paperwork.
Efficient calendar management
Calendar management is another time-consuming but necessary task needed in healthcare practices. The good news is virtual medical assistants can efficiently handle this process, including answering phones, scheduling appointments, and sending follow-ups.
Having a dedicated assistant attend to this task reduces cancellations and ensures patients can see their doctors at the best possible time.
Accurate medical billing and coding
While accurate medical billing and coding are crucial in every healthcare practice, it can also be exhausting to both clinicians and patients.
To make this step less stressful, you can delegate this task to an experienced virtual medical assistant who will ensure the accuracy of invoices, claims, and paperwork needed to process medical bills.
Handling of patients’ medical records
The quality of service that healthcare professionals provide is only as good as the information they’re provided with. This is why having correct and up-to-date records is highly essential.
As busy individuals, doctors don’t have the time anymore to update patient records. Virtual assistants are the best people to fill this gap, so medical professionals remain confident that they’re working on patient information that are accurate and updated.
Effective telemedicine support
Ever since the pandemic, more and more patients have been relying on telemedicine. However, patients and doctors can sometimes get frustrated using telemedicine due to technical faults.
Thanks to the technical expertise of virtual assistants, these challenges are now easily addressed. Healthcare assistants help monitor the performance of the tool they’re using and can quickly guide patients and users into how the process works.
Excellent patient communication
Clear communication is an absolute must when it comes to providing patient care.
With the help of a healthcare virtual assistant, your practice can rest assured that patients get answers to their inquiries, receive timely updates, can easily schedule follow-ups, and are well-informed of their treatment plans.
Insurance verification
As most patients rely on their insurance for their payments, it’s important to verify their insurance coverage when setting appointments. Healthcare virtual assistants help in verifying this information and reduce billing issues that may come down the line.
Prescription management
Another critical part of healthcare service is ensuring patients can get their prescriptions when they need them. Virtual medical assistants take on this responsibility by monitoring prescription refills and becoming the middleman between patients and pharmacies.
Why should you hire a healthcare virtual assistant now?
If you’re still not convinced about hiring a virtual assistant, here are a few more factors you should consider:
Rising administrative costs
Costs in the healthcare sector are continuously going up, which begs the question, how can you cut expenses without sacrificing the quality of care?
The solution is healthcare virtual assistants.
Virtual medical assistants are a cost-effective solution to this problem as they provide the same quality of service as full-time assistants but without the additional expense.
Greater focus on patient-centered care
Without exceptional patient care, your healthcare business won’t be able to keep running. However, it can be challenging to achieve this when your physicians and clinical staff are all burnt out and stretched thin.
Healthcare virtual assistants address this by taking over routine tasks that used to bog down healthcare professionals. Now, doctors and clinicians can dedicate their time to providing excellent service to patients.
Staying up-to-date with technology
What the healthcare sector looked like five years ago is totally different from what it looks like now. Technology is rapidly changing this industry and it might be too difficult to keep up with it.
But if you want to stay ahead and overtake your competitors, staying updated with technology is the way.
To fully take advantage of technology, you should hire a tech-savvy virtual assistant who can easily adopt new tools and software and integrate them into your medical practice.
How can you find the perfect virtual assistant for your medical practice?
Many virtual assistants are offering their healthcare services left and right, but how do you make sure you get the perfect one? Here are some things you could look for and ask your potential medical virtual assistant:
Essential skills and qualifications to look for:
Communication skills: A medical virtual assistant communicates extensively to both patients and healthcare professionals. This makes excellent communication skills a requirement as they need to relay information accurately and communicate professionally.
Attention to detail: Accuracy is highly important, especially in the healthcare industry, where lives are at stake. Your virtual medical assistant should be meticulous and quick to catch any errors in patient records and paperwork.
Healthcare software experience: A big chunk of their jobs involve working with electronic health records and other healthcare-specific software. Being familiar with these tools goes a long way and helps assistants hit the ground running when they start their duties.
Knowledge of the medical industry: Understanding medical terminologies should be second nature to virtual medical assistants. After all, you wouldn’t want a healthcare assistant who can’t keep up with medical conversations, especially when they’re transcribing patient interactions.
Crucial questions to ask potential assistants:
What is your experience working in the healthcare industry?
How will you implement the HIPAA protocol and other medical guidelines in your day-to-day tasks?
How experienced are you in administrative duties, both front-office and back-office?
How do you manage your time and workload in a busy industry?
Hire a healthcare virtual assistant today!
With all the transformative benefits and help provided by virtual medical assistants, we’d say the best time for you to hire one was yesterday. And the next best time is today!
Reducing your administrative burden, improving patient-focused care, and advancing with technology are just some of the things you can achieve through healthcare virtual assistant.
If you’re ready to hire your virtual assistant, take the leap and contact us today!
