Faced with increasing patient demands, rising wages and challenges finding reliable staff members, Green Mountain Partners for Health in Denver reached a breaking point. Only one medical assistant (MA) was supporting its clinic. Something had to change.
The solution: Hire a series of virtual assistants to help with faxes, messages, even billing needs. These remote, independent contractors allow you to increase pay, benefits, and satisfaction for your in-person employees, as well as retain those in-person employees, said AMA member Carolynn Francavilla, MD, the private practice’s founder and CEO.
Dr. Francavilla spoke about basics of hiring virtual assistants and her practice’s success story during a session that is part of the AMA Private Practice Simple Solutions series of free, open-access rapid-learning cycles that provide opportunities to implement actionable changes that can immediately increase efficiency in private practices.
The session is available to view on demand, as are all previous sessions in the AMA Private Practice Simple Solutions series (registration required).
Virtual assistants gaining in popularity
A virtual assistant might be working somewhere in the United States, or in your state, or down the street from you, “but they also may be working remotely from another country on the other side of the world,” said Dr. Francavilla.
Following the expiration of the federally declared COVID-19 public health emergency, two factors have driven the popularity of virtual assistants in private practices.
The first is rising physician practice costs. Labor-force reductions in most communities have also made it harder to find employees. “That has been a real challenge to being able to serve our patients,” said Dr. Francavilla, a family physician and obesity medicine specialist.
Hiring a virtual assistant offers many advantages. “You can remove a lot of administrative burden that may be very stressful to the physicians at the practice,” she said. Virtual assistants can dramatically improve efficiency and help with other things such as increasing patient access to care.
It takes astute clinical judgment as well as a commitment to collaboration and solving challenging problems to succeed in independent settings that are often fluid, and the AMA offers the resources and support physicians need to both start and sustain success in private practice.
How to use virtual assistants in the office
Physician private practices should take the time to write down the tasks that virtual assistants could do. This may include reminder calls or other scheduling needs, scribing, or answering the phone. They could also take care of referrals, laboratory orders or other tasks that need to be done while physicians are caring for patients.
Prior authorization requirements are a big burden on patients and clinics. “One of the most high-value things we have gotten out of our virtual assistants is to train them on how to complete these prior authorizations to really help our patients get the medications they need,” said Dr. Francavilla.
Triaging in clinic is another use for virtual assistants, as well as billing and coding. Virtual assistants may be skilled in remote patient monitoring. “If that's something that you're using to engage patients or to generate additional revenue, your virtual assistant may be the right person to do that,” she advised.
Other uses may include chronic care management, remote-patient monitoring data entry, inventory or supply monitoring, and language-support translation.
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Training, pay considerations
Special considerations may include training, the hours you want the virtual assistant to work, appropriate pay, impact on the patient experience, and how this might change roles for in-person employees.
“Even if your virtual assistant is hired through a third party, I would recommend that you make sure they are HIPAA trained as well on your end,” Dr. Francavilla said.
A “wonderful solution”
Struggling with personnel shortages and increasing patient demands, Dr. Francavilla’s clinic knew it needed to change its staffing and workflow.
“Virtual assistants became a really wonderful solution for us,” she said.
The clinic hired two virtual assistants through a company. They took on basic tasks such as managing faxes and messages. The clinic managed prior authorizations by diverting its budget to virtual assistants, “which were more affordable than the MAs and receptionists in our market,” she said. The practice also hired a skilled office manager and two in-person MAs. Eventually, the practice hired additional virtual assistants to do billing and other tasks.
These hires “allowed us to redistribute things, not just workload, but also financially, how we were distributing income in our clinic,” said Dr. Francavilla.
The wins: offering more services to patients, making sure patients were getting everything they need in terms of prior authorizations, coordination with specialists, finding medications, and improving billing efficiency with a skilled virtual assistant who had expertise in billing. The practice also improved job satisfaction “because our in-person staff didn't feel like they were doing some of the more boring tasks that took them away from patient care that they enjoyed more,” she said.
Find out more about the AMA Private Practice Physicians Section, which seeks to preserve the freedom, independence and integrity of private practice.
