As a physician, you have a one-of-a-kind opportunity to make a significant difference in someone’s life. Your patients place their most personal information in your hands and rely on you for medical diagnoses and advice. Doctors study for a decade or more to obtain the necessary credentials to treat patients. Nonetheless, they devote more time to administrative tasks than to patient care.
To handle the patients more efficiently, a virtual medical assistant helps to manage the healthcare business. We’ll go over everything you need to know about virtual MA (Medical Assistants) in this article, including what they are, the benefits of using them, how they work, and what guarantees you can expect.
What is a Virtual Medical Assistant?
A healthcare virtual assistant is a person who works remotely and can assist you with routine tasks such as managing the front office, scheduling patient appointments, engaging patients, and so on. Hiring a virtual medical assistant can be an excellent addition to your in-house medical team, especially if you’re just starting and can’t afford a full-time assistant.
What Type of Tasks A Virtual Medical Assistant Can Handle?
Following are some of the tasks a medical VA can handle.
Administrative Tasks
You may not realize it at first, but managerial tasks consume a significant amount of your time. Daily tasks in a healthcare facility range from scheduling patient appointments to converting physical records to digital ones. All of these tasks can be handled by your medical virtual assistant, ensuring a smooth clinical workflow in your office.
- Digitization of paper forms
- Managing EMR (Electronic Medical Records)
- Scheduling patient appointments
- Verifying insurance documents
- Billing for medical services
Patient Support
Patients may have a few questions that they fail to ask during the appointment. Calls, emails, and text messages are some of the ways they can communicate their inquiries. Having a healthcare virtual assistant handle these virtual queries frees up your in-house team to focus on patients who are physically present or tasks that must be completed in person.
- Providing patient support via email, messaging, online chats, and other means
- Responding to general patient inquiries
- Requests for prescription refills are processed
- Updating patients on upcoming appointments, etc.
Technical & Creative Tasks
Many virtual assistants have strong technical skills, and some may even be proficient in content creation. Using these skills to improve your online presence will allow you to reach a wider audience and expand your healthcare practice.
- Digital Marketing
- Taking care of your social media accounts
- Creating a user-friendly interface for a website
- Making relevant and interesting content for your website or social media
- IT support
While these skills are not required in a healthcare setting, they will add significant value to your practice.
How Virtual Medical Assistant Improves Patient Care?
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for virtual medical assistant services in the medical industry has skyrocketed. Because of the ongoing skilled labor shortage in America, this industry will continue to grow until at least the end of the decade.
Front Office Management & Communication
Clear communication is an important aspect of the patient experience in small-to-medium-sized medical practices. It goes beyond simply informing and reminding the patient of appointments. Telephone, email, webchats, and third-party platforms such as social media should be used to encourage two-way communication. Front-office staff may be swamped with work at times and miss out on appointment reminders, birthday wishes, or whatever else you want to convey to your patients. When given tasks, VAs are strictly monitored at the backend to ensure that whatever you want to convene is carried out.
Enhanced Efficiency & Reduced Waiting Times
Many back-office processes help to improve the overall patient experience. Triage systems that systematically prioritize patients’ treatments based on the urgency for medical care, when managed effectively by a virtual MA, significantly improve patient satisfaction and the overall patient experience.
Furthermore, VA can help with ordering prescriptions, updating electronic medical records (EMRs), and filling out patient charts, which can speed up processes and reduce errors. This improves patients’ perceptions of the overall service provided by your practice. We can return to how medical virtual assistants can help you save time and money.
Creates Transparency
When your practice is transparent, managing patient expectations becomes easier. Even if they were referred, patients are always on the lookout for additional information about physicians and their practices. According to recent studies, patients will even choose another provider if the information they find online does not meet their needs.
Medical VAs can help patients by encouraging and reminding them to leave online reviews. This will increase your credibility and foster trust among potential patients. But don’t expect all of the reviews to be positive.
What are the Benefits of Hiring Virtual Medical Assistants?
Here are two major reasons why you should hire a medical VA for your healthcare practice:
Costs Savings
You should only pay your medical VA for the time they are actively working on your tasks. You can also base the amount on the number of hours worked, clients handled, and so on. This means you won’t have to pay them a set salary, which can be prohibitively expensive if you want to hire a full-time in-house assistant.
Because a VA is not a full-time employee, you are not required to pay for employee benefits such as pensions, health insurance, and so on. Hiring a virtual Administrative assistant can save you a lot of money that would otherwise be spent on an office setup. This includes a desk, phone line, computer, and other equipment. You also don’t need to make a specific space in your healthcare organization available for the assistant, allowing you to have a larger waiting area, a pantry, and so on.
Improved Patient Experience
A long wait time, doctors who are behind schedule, incompetent staff, and other major complaints may jeopardize your healthcare practice, especially if you are just starting out. Medical VAs aid in streamlining this process and improving the patient experience. Furthermore, because VAs are virtually present, they prevent patient room crowding by scheduling appointments. And, with the VAs handling your administrative tasks, you can spend more time with your patients.
Wrapping Up
Virtual Medical Assistant can help you a lot in managing medical practice but the best results come from professional virtual MAs. Connect with VA.Care to get the services of virtual MA. Get the assistants at the best price possible. Visit the website for more information.