From a rapidly changing healthcare landscape to a worsening healthcare workforce shortage and a volatile economy, medical practices face crippling difficulties from all fronts. As you grapple with today’s industry challenges, you’ll need all the help you can get—virtual medical staff could just be the answer you’ve been missing.
In today’s economic climate characterized by soaring prices and recession fears, cutting costs is essential for any business to survive. While economic conditions demand frugality, patient expectations keep getting more demanding, requiring more personnel to meet the changing needs.
As a result, many practices find themselves torn between expanding their team to keep up or cutting costs but running the risk of failing to meet their operational and clinical needs. Hiring a medical assistant or a remote team can save you from this dreadful dilemma and instantly fill the gaps in your workforce.
In this blog, we will compare on-site and virtual medical staffing and highlight the top 5 benefits of virtual staffing in healthcare.
As healthcare organizations strive to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and improve patient care, remote medical staffing has emerged as a viable solution. Virtual technologies have revolutionized the healthcare industry, providing considerable benefits for healthcare organizations, such as:
One of the most significant advantages remote staffing brings to your practice is reducing overhead expenses. A virtual medical staff saves you money on training, supervision, office space, utilities, equipment, and supplies.
Remote staffing allows you to tap into a global talent pool, which often means lower payroll and benefits costs. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, private sector employers spend an average of $10.88 per hour per employee on benefits alone. That accounts for 29.2% of the total hourly costs of hiring an on-site employee.
Since remote employees aren’t subject to your local wage laws, you can employ highly skilled professionals at lower labor costs compared to hiring on-site staff locally.
Virtual medical staffing eliminates geographical limitations, enabling healthcare organizations to access talent globally. This expanded reach allows you to leverage trained, qualified staff who are committed to your practice you wouldn’t have found in your locality.
Remote staffing provides your practice with tremendous scalability potential. During peak periods of sudden surges in patient volume, virtual medical assistants and admin staff can quickly fill in vacant positions to meet your business needs.
Virtual staffing agencies like DrCatalyst respond to your most urgent staffing requirements and take the burden off your shoulders to source the qualified talent for your practice.
Overworked healthcare workers are a common sight in many practices across the country. According to the latest data, 57% of healthcare workers worry about suffering from burnout due to repetitive admin tasks.
With virtual staffing, however, you can delegate documentation and other admin work to your remote staff and realign your on-site staff’s focus back to patient care. Not only does virtual staffing help spread the workload, it also improves your staff’s productivity and work-life balance, consequently increasing on-site employee satisfaction.
Despite the apparent benefits and advantages of virtual staffing in healthcare, a few misconceived notions still hold others back from fully embracing it. One of the most popular misconceptions about virtual staffing is that it can’t replace on-site employees, which is a faulty argument in the first place.
Your remote team is not meant to replace your on-site staff—it’s supposed to augment and complement them. Hire virtual staff members for tasks and workflows that don’t require in-person patient interaction, such as a clinical call center, virtual medical assistant, revenue cycle management, medical transcriptionist, medical billing, and other clinical and administrative roles.
DrCatalyst has been successfully providing staffing services to thousands of practices across the country for 11 years. From talent acquisition to a seamless implementation process and continuous supervision, we provide unparalleled support to ensure an effective, long-term virtual staffing partnership.
“We can dedicate more space to patient visits onsite, we have less onsite technology and supply costs, we can focus more on onsite staff and reduce turnover, and we avoid HIPAA concerns with remote staff during COVID,” said David Hughes COO & CFO of Elica Health Centers. “The level of expertise and consultative and quality based metrics and results can only be found with DrCatalyst.”
With over 1,100 remote experts in our global workforce, DrCatalyst can fill the gaps in your staffing at a fraction of the cost and time of hiring on-site staff locally. Get started today!
