Benefits of Having a Virtual Assistant for Doctors
We know that time-consuming workloads in the clinic can lead to burnout among healthcare professionals, especially doctors. Your primary responsibility may be to take care of your patients, handle administrative work, and take care of other tasks. Even when you consider getting an in-house personal assistant, it can be too costly.
Fortunately, many doctors can hire virtual healthcare assistants (VAs) at an affordable price to assist with some of their tasks.
So, read on to discover the benefits of having a virtual assistant for doctors.
What Is a Virtual Assistant?
Virtual assistants are office administration professionals who work online or virtually from their homes or offices. The benefits of hiring a virtual assistant are the same as hiring an employee but with more flexibility. Following your schedule and theirs, they may complete their work during or after regular business hours.
Most virtual assistants can do the same tasks as in-house staff. Among them are:
- Confirming appointments and scheduling them
- Reminding people of their appointments
- Following up with patients
- Obtaining information about insurance
- Data entry duties and updating patient files
- Assisting with accounting and payroll duties as required
Also, virtual assistants can handle high-level patient inquiries and answer phone calls. The virtual assistant can forward the message to the doctor if a client has a more detailed question.
What Are the Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Assistant?
Your reputation and hard work are your most important foundations as a doctor. However, your success does not depend solely on your medical knowledge. In most cases, your office's administrative team will be the first to communicate with patients and maintain it.
According to
Business Wire, the market size for virtual assistants will reach $25.6 billion by 2025. So, hiring a virtual assistant for doctors allows you to provide much-needed support to your practice and improve patient care.
6 Benefits of Having a Virtual Assistant for Doctors
According to a study, doctors spend too much time on their computers that they miss nonverbal cues during examinations. Fortunately, a virtual medical assistant can help you avoid this situation easily. Check out these six benefits below:
1. Enhances Doctor-Patient Relationships
With a virtual assistant, doctors can set up patient follow-ups and personal calls for further medical advice quickly and easily. The doctors can also focus on each patient while someone else handles the background work.
On the other hand, overcrowded waiting rooms make patients uncomfortable and dread overcrowding. At the moment, VAs can help doctors set up one-on-one appointments for patients who require personal consultations without them having to visit the clinic. In turn, that leads to a better doctor-patient relationship.
2. Saves You More Time
Most doctors are unable to devote all their time to their patients. That's a real concern. This kind of situation affects many health care providers. Thus, hiring a virtual assistant for doctors can help them handle day-to-day tasks.
Furthermore, you can hire virtual medical assistants to make up for the lost time in your day. By asking patients standard questions about symptoms and family medical history, your virtual medical assistant can gather the data and present it to you for analysis. They are responsible for reminding patients about their medication and monitoring them. In a study,
a total of 69% of patients agreed to continue using the virtual assistant after the survey.
Meanwhile, spending too much time on repetitive, monotonous tasks will also negatively affect the core operations of your healthcare team. It is easier to delegate such tasks to a virtual assistant, enabling your team to focus on higher-priority tasks.
3. Cost-Effective
During the COVID-19 pandemic,
97% of doctors were directly or indirectly affected financially. Consequently, the hiring of virtual medical assistants became rampant since medical doctors could not complete many tasks in one day.
Many doctors hire
virtual medical assistants without investing in physical space or office equipment like telephones or computers. A VA can save you much money by working remotely instead of hiring in-house.
Furthermore, there is no requirement for VAs to receive additional benefits, such as health insurance and a pension. It is simply a matter of compensating them for the services they provide. Thus, you can get your work done faster and more efficiently without incurring additional costs.
For doctors, there are times when your clinic is overcrowded and days when it is unusually quiet. Whenever you hire a virtual assistant full-time, you will pay a fixed salary regardless of the amount of work you ask of them. This situation can put undue pressure on your bank account if your clinic is still in its early stages. By hiring virtual professionals, you can say goodbye to fixed costs.
4. Training Is Not Necessary
A virtual assistant is responsible for staying abreast of all the latest developments in their field. If they're a part of an agency, they will also receive training from their employer. The only thing you need to do is assign tasks to the VA and provide onboarding.
5. Increases Productivity
A trusted VA gives you the freedom to focus on growth. You'll also free up resources by freeing up time, which is great for everyone. Additionally, your virtual assistant should be able to suggest ways to be more productive and save time you might not think of.
You may ask them to manage your email and keep up with spreadsheets, among other things. You become more productive as you complete daily tasks like entering data, answering calls, and communicating with vendors, patients, and payroll.
6. Provides Flexibility
Make sure your virtual assistant can stay in touch with you after regular working hours.
Virtual assistants who work from home are more likely to be on call for you, even if it means answering an email or phone call in the middle of the night.
Having someone with this flexibility is especially useful if you run a hectic clinic and need to do tasks on the fly.
Partner with DrCatalyst
Our team at
DrCatalyst is known to be the most reliable source for providing virtual medical staff. With years of experience and a quality track record, we offer virtual staffing services of the highest standard.
Give us a quick call, and we'll get you started!
