If you haven’t already hired a virtual assistant to assist you in your practice, it’s likely because you either aren’t quite sure how a virtual assistant would work in your office, or you’re concerned that hiring a medical VA just isn’t worth the money … that it won’t pay off in the long run.
Today, we’re going to break down both questions, so you can feel good about bringing a virtual assistant into your practice.
What exactly is a virtual assistant?
A virtual assistant is a remote employee who works FOR your office without working IN your office. With the growing popularity of remote work, you likely have some employees today who don’t come into the office every day. As you’ve already learned, a great employee is a great employee, no matter where they are.
Virtual assistants can take care of any task in your office that doesn’t require physical presence. At MedVa, our virtual assistants are often hired to take care of:
Medical billing
Updating patient EMRs
Transcribing notes
Receptionist duties such as answering the phone and returning calls
Appointment scheduling
Taking notes during appointments via a secure software
Insurance filing and claims
And much more!
When you hire a virtual assistant, that person is available to you during whatever work hours you set, just like a regular employee. You can hire your virtual assistant to work part-time, full-time, or more than full-time.
In general, the employee will have a daily task list that they attend to, and you can be in contact with your virtual employee as much as is necessary during the day via chat, email, or video call. Many people are surprised to learn that working with a virtual assistant is just like working with an in-house employee. The only difference is that everything is done online instead of in person.
What do virtual assistants get paid?
The pay scale for virtual healthcare assistants is one of the biggest reasons that this type of employee produces impressive ROI. Hiring an in-house employee like a receptionist, medical assistant, or insurance billing specialist can cost upward of $40/hour in some locations. Payroll can become an undue burden when building an effective staffing level, especially for small or single-provider practices. This is why many small practices are led by doctors who are burned out and overworked — they’re trying to do everything themselves because they think they can’t afford proper help.
The average salary of a virtual assistant, however, is around the hourly minimum wage for your state. For the same price as a single in-house employee, you can tap into the knowledge, skill, and labor of four full-time virtual assistants. This is why many smaller practices choose to staff their offices with virtual employees. Virtual employees make it possible to carry an entire staff on a smaller budget.
But virtual assistants aren’t just for small practices. They’ve become popular for larger organizations, as well. With inflation at a 40-year high and the Covid-19 labor shortage driving up wages, practice managers have found that they can solve their staffing issues with virtual assistants, who are never in short supply.
Ways virtual assistants produce impressive ROI
Imagine what your practice could accomplish if only you had enough high-quality employees to get everything done right, on time, the first time. That’s the world you’re entering when you staff with virtual assistants. Here are just a few of the ways hiring a virtual assistant provides striking ROI and helps build a better bottom line for your practice.
You don’t have to pay for overtime – Because virtual assistants typically live and work from countries outside the U.S., American labor laws do not apply. That means you don’t have to pay overtime for work beyond 40 hours.
You don’t have to pay for benefits – Virtual assistants, while working for your practice, are technically employed through a third-party agency like MedVa. That means you aren’t required to pay for health insurance, dental insurance, workers’ compensation insurance, or any other benefits for your virtual assistants. The hourly minimum wage for your state means exactly that, not a penny more!
You can tap into a highly skilled workforce without paying higher prices – Usually, finding a highly skilled employee with university degrees and specialty certifications costs a pretty penny here in the United States, because the demand for these types of workers tends to outpace the supply. That’s not the story in countries like the Philippines, where the population is typically highly educated in general. For just the hourly minimum wage for your state, you can bring on staff members with advanced degrees and years of specialty experience.
Providers are free to focus on income-generating tasks – When providers hand over tedious tasks like updating EMRs, returning calls, and transcribing notes to a virtual assistant, that leaves the provider free to focus on income-generating tasks like seeing patients. An hour’s worth of patient visits is worth tremendously more than the rate the virtual assistant is being paid, creating exponentially growing ROI.
Virtual assistants help prevent doctor burnout – In today’s high-pressure medical industry, doctors face burnout at higher levels than any other profession. When a doctor starts to experience burnout, all sorts of things can happen that negatively affect the practice’s bottom line, including issues with trouble with cognition, memory, and decision-making skills. Delegating tedious tasks to a virtual assistant frees physicians up to work fewer hours, focus more on tasks they find enjoyable, and prevent burnout.
Great customer service = More referrals – Patients’ biggest complaints about their doctors usually don’t have anything to do with the medical care they receive. What bothers them most is that they can’t get their calls returned, can’t get through to an actual human being when they call, and can’t get in to see the doctor as soon as they need to. A virtual assistant can assist in all of these. A virtual assistant can answer calls, return messages, and respond to online inquiries in real-time, all virtually. And when some of the doctor’s workload is off-loaded to a virtual assistant, their schedule opens up so they can see more patients, making it easier for patients to get appointments when they need them.
Virtual assistant ROI is practically limitless
There are countless ways a virtual assistant can produce ROI for your clinic, practice, or business. Want to know more? Schedule a call with MedVa today. We provide top-quality virtual assistants to practices all over the country that enjoy top-tier employees for a fraction of the cost of in-person staff. Schedule your call today.
Comentários