The Direct Care Way

Virtual Assistant - Updates

August 30, 2022 Tea Nguyen, DPM Episode 29
The Direct Care Way
Virtual Assistant - Updates
Show Notes Transcript

I first spoke about having a Virtual Assistant for my medical practice here with Podiatry Today

https://www.hmpgloballearningnetwork.com/site/podiatry/podcasts/implementing-virtual-assistant-podiatric-practice

This is the update on my experiences. I am currently not using one since becoming a direct care practice simply because I don't have the workload for one! But you might still benefit from adding one to your team. Take a listen to hear more. 


Dr. Tea  0:01  
Owners of a direct care practice are more likely to experience higher job satisfaction than the insurance based practice. And it's no wonder why direct care is independent of insurance. Patients pay the doctor directly for their expertise. The doctor gets full autonomy in how they care for patients and how they get paid. We've chosen this path for the love of medicine. This is the direct care way. 

Dr. Tea  0:26  
By listening to this podcast, you may even start to believe you too can have a successful direct care practice. Come listen with an open mind. As I share my personal journey on how I pivoted from an insurance based practice to direct care right in the middle of a pandemic, and the valuable lessons along the way. This podcast may be the very thing you need to revitalize your medical practice. I'm your host owner of a direct care podiatry practice, Dr. Tea Nguyen.

Dr. Tea  0:55  
Welcome to episode 29. This one is going to be an update to an existing podcast episode that I did for podiatry. Today, I'm going to give you a tangible tool, if you are in private practice right now. And you need a little bit of help. So I'm going to talk about virtual assistants and how valuable they can be to your practice. So if you have a private practice, and your phones are off the hook, and you're doing insurance, verification, it's tying up your phone line is tying up your resources. A virtual assistant can be the person who steps in to manage these administrative duties. I came across virtual assistants from another doctor. And again, in my business ventures. And everywhere in all the different disciplines, people are using virtual assistants to be more efficient, while keeping costs low, keeping their overhead low. 

Dr. Tea  1:51  
So then I got curious, and then I wondered if that was going to work for me. Then I reached out to other doctors in private practice, who were already using virtual assistant to see what their experience was like. And by the time they told me all of the stuff that they were getting done this old way I said, Of course, I'm gonna have to give this a try. I was positioning myself at that time. With the insurance contracts, you know, I had to deal a lot with insurance verification. And that was just really holding up my staff in the office where I needed them to be with me, or with the patients instead in real life. So I looked at all of the work that my staff was doing, and wrote a list of things that maybe a virtual assistant could do. So you're wondering, what is a virtual assistant, exactly a VA. 

Dr. Tea  2:49  
This is a person who is part of your team, they are an extension of your practice, who can help with remote tasks, like scheduling a patient, making follow up phone calls, calling other medical offices for chart notes or referrals. Or even if you're still in the insurance based practice, they can be on the phone with the insurance company dealing with coverage. This was previously recommended to me to have somebody in high school or in college looking for a secondary job, which is a really economical way to spend your dollars. But they found that a virtual assistant could be a little bit more consistent in my business. So I gave it a go. Now a virtual assistant exist within companies or they can be individual contractors. More commonly, you'll probably have better access to companies that market to medical offices who have virtual assistants living in different countries like Philippines or Mexico. So the company itself exists in the United States, but they are outsourcing to other countries. 

Dr. Tea  4:03  
The advantage of that is that people are choosing to work with us doctors, because dollars go further for that. And this allows them job flexibility. The rates for the virtual assistant can range from $5 an hour to $10 an hour really depends on what your needs are. In my first virtual assistants, Pat said to me that her job as a VA paid more than her job as a nurse. So in different parts of the world, there are different economic circumstances. So some people see this as some kind of exploitation, when in reality, they're actually getting paid more than they would in their usual jobs that are available to them. Even nursing. How crazy is that? Right? So this is actually a win win situation for you, the business owner in the United States. You know, we have a lot of overhead when we're working with insurance or just having private practice and staff, you know, we had to pay into taxes, a great amount, amongst other things that we are now encountering, like the increased cost of basically everything, your gas, shipping for whatever it is you have shipped to your place, and even the raw materials to make all the stuff that you need for your office. So this is not an exploitation if done correctly. 

Dr. Tea  5:28  
The next question is, what did the VA do for me, so in general, VAs can do whatever task you can assign to them, that could be done over the computer or remotely from home. So I took a evaluation of my practice, and what was holding up a lot of my workflow was phone calls. And sometimes phone calls could be as benign as Can you remind me what my appointment time was? Or can you tell me what the directions are new things that can be answered easily by somebody remotely. So that's what I used my VA for, they were going to take care of overflow calls. And so I created a short list of things that they were assigned to do, which was answering phone calls and returning phone calls. So the few tasks that I assigned to them was intended to free up my in house staff, there was a time where I thought I wanted to go completely virtual, it just turned out to be impractical for the type of business I wanted to run. I wanted to run a personalized micro practice, which meant I needed people in house to create that personalized experience. But a virtual assistant provided an extension to my practice, when I couldn't be available, or my staff couldn't be available by answering the phone. So it was really wonderful. At the time I had the virtual assistant, I was still contracted with insurance. So this was a big load of my back, having someone take care of the insurance side of things like insurance verification, checking, eligibility, prior authorizations, and so on. That was extremely helpful. But to date, as this is an update to my original recording, I don't have a VA right now, because I've scaled down from the insurance based model to direct care, which meant a lot of my overhead, a lot of my stress, a lot of the phone calls, you know, just a lot of the administrative duties are eradicated. So I don't really have overflow phone calls that often anymore, it's tolerable, people can leave voice messages. And we just get back to them, you know, at our next available time. So I don't have a virtual assistant at this moment for my practice, but I do utilize them for other parts of my business. 

Dr. Tea  7:54  
So for marketing, for example, is another way you can use a virtual assistant. So another question comes up, how are they trained, virtual assistants are just part of a company, they aren't actually trained by the company to do what you need them to do in your practice, that will be your job. So they may come prepared understanding what HIPAA laws are, and the general idea of what insurances do for patients and what we have to do as doctors to help patients get covered benefits. But that's kind of the bare minimum, it's not really enough to just let them go about their way and assume that they're going to do what you want them to do unless you train them. So you have to train your VA, just like you would train any other staff member, you need to create some guidelines, some protocols, and then do weekly meetings to review these phone calls. So my phone system, my phone system is a VoIP, it's a voice over IP, meaning I can make phone calls from my laptop with the phone number that comes to the office. It's all connected. 

Dr. Tea  9:04  
So my virtual assistant can call from her laptop with my phone number. It's super easy. It probably makes more sense once you start getting used to it. But it's not a landline where she has to be she or he has to be plugged into their landline. It's super easy. If you have internet you can make these phone calls is different from a landline. And this is what most companies have is a VoIP. So my VA is able to access my phone portal through their computer and make calls directly from their computer. It's very straightforward. The next question is is it secure? And this will always be in question because the VA wherever they are are going to be using their own computers. So knowing that I do have some limited duties that I assign to the virtual assistant and I also recommend that you individually review you Your HIPAA policies with your VA and ensure that they understand how to protect patient privacy, their information, and so on, and have them sign a business associate agreement or a BA, just to have it in place. And be aware of general protection, like having cyber coverage for your practice, should there be a hack issue in your system and compromising everyone's information. 

Dr. Tea  10:28  
And we cannot guarantee that these things won't happen. But we can at least make the effort to demonstrate that we made every attempt to ensure the security of these private information. So my VA does not have access to any of my financial information. They aren't limited in that regard. In my EMR system, I have a secure credit card on file, which means that nobody within my practice, or even the EMR company can see the entire credit card digit, we only see the last four digits, so the rest is secure. And I don't allow my VA to accept any payment information over the phone, patients can pay through the portal themselves, or I'll have my staff member in house with the privileges to do so assist in payment options. So I do have some limitations on what my VA could and could not do. The next question is, are there training manuals on how to get started with a VA there probably is, I know that there is but I didn't have access to one at the time. 

Dr. Tea  11:35  
So I kind of what I learned from this experience was not to make any assumptions about what they know and what they don't know, you kind of just have to train them as if you're training anybody in house. And so you want to train them that they don't know, and let them know exactly what you need them to do. So there is training position. Now if you have an office manager, then your office manager can delegate this workflow to them, you will want to have some kind of protocol in place, whether it's through Google documents where it's shareable information and can get updated regularly, or talk about it at your weekly meetings. That is something I highly recommend is have consistency in the weekly meetings. Because what I found that when I skipped a week or so then the protocols started to get shifted, or they were doing things that I didn't approve. And that can be really frustrating. If you go on weeks or months without a meeting without clarification, it can prevent a lot of confusion down the road. 

Dr. Tea  12:37  
So consider that as part of just your regular training with your virtual assistant. And next question is, do you have any particular issues with the VA, a few things that stood out in my experiences with the couple of years I've had in the past was that because I was utilizing somebody out of the country, they do have an accent, some people's accents are very strong, some are moderate. But this can be off putting if the person they're communicating with cannot understand them clearly. And I know that this was an issue because patients have brought it up that they could not understand what my VA was saying. And they were really frustrated because it was a heated exchange where there was no clarity, no understanding. And that was something that I wasn't aware of it. So luckily, I screen my phones. And the patient called me later, and I happened to answer the phone and she told me exactly what was going on in her side. And so it did bother me that the accent got in the way of clear communication. So that's something to consider if that ends up being an issue for you. That only happened maybe once or twice. It wasn't a big issue. But you know what people are going to speak how they speak and so is it trainable? I don't know, I don't know that I wanted to go in that direction where I was responsible in training somebody to speak much clearer. I feel like that's just something that is easier. By pre screening your VA applicants on whether or not they're going to be a good fit for your practice. 

Dr. Tea  14:11  
Another issue I did have, in my personal experience was that one of my staff member had a difficult time communicating simultaneously with the VA, which created a little bit of a problem. Well, you know, staff interaction is always going to be some kind of difficulty, some kind of challenge. You know, we know this in general HR, that people are people we all have different personalities. I think the difficulty was that the communication was face to face. And that was something that my staff my in house staff had a hard time with. And so there was a little bit of a communication disconnect. Not a lot I can do about that. I mean, I would have meetings regularly and I would have clarification and just do not type instead speak to each other so you can understand because sometimes through typing through email or chat boxes, no communication is best understood when you do it live in person or voice to voice rather than typing or email. Because a lot of things can be misinterpreted, which is reading what somebody else wrote, they were just not seeing eye to eye. 

Dr. Tea  15:14  
And that was a little bit frustrating because there wasn't a whole lot that I could do. On my side, this was really a personality issue. And also, you know, an example that really bothered me was when one staff would give the other constructive criticism, the other would get really defensive. And in that scenario, I really have no control over the situation, I can only tell them how I want things to be done. And if you have a staff member that doesn't know how to take ownership, or have leadership skills, and helping others do the job as they should, then it gets a little bit more challenging to manage. So many of these companies that hire out vas, they do require full time hours, because it's job security for their employees or their contractors. I'm not sure if they're employees or contractors, but whoever they sign on. So as I was scaling from my insurance based practice into direct care, I didn't really need the virtual assistant anymore. 

Dr. Tea  16:15  
So that's why I stopped using a VA. So I stopped using the VA. But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop indefinitely. I know there's a place and a role for them in my business. It's just right now, I have scaled down so much that it's not really necessary to have a VA full time. But maybe it is an option for you. And maybe you have a lot of work that needs to be done. That's kind of just lingering around, because you're overworked, that's where a VA can really help pick up some of that backlog, and help you be a little bit more efficient in your processes. So the VA is a really great thing. It's a win win situation, because it provides the VA job flexibility and better pay in many instances. And then on the business side, it is just lower cost to have this type of service. Now you're comparing a VA who you may be paying $10 an hour for versus an in house staff who might be whatever the competition is $20 An hour plus benefits. Plus, you know, all of these other perks that they're wanting, plus the expectation of raises and bonuses and things like that, and those numbers do add up. So I find that having one of each was useful in my scenario, and you can see what works out for you. 

Dr. Tea  17:34  
If the VA doesn't work out for you, then that's okay, you can always hire somebody else. And what's really nice about some of these companies is that you can go through a screening process initially, just tell him what you want, you know, the hours that you're expecting to work, maybe a certain type of background you're looking for, and you can do the pre screening, and they do have a lot of applicants for that. So I hope that this was helpful. This is really just an update of an existing podcast, The original podcast, and additional information will be in the link in the show notes. So listen to that and see if a virtual assistant will be a great addition to your practice and for your efficiency flow. Alright, that's it for this week. I'll catch you next week.

Dr. Tea  18:18  
Thank you so much for being here with me today. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, please like, share and subscribe so more people like you can have access to another way of practicing medicine, that direct care way. Let's connect by my info in the show notes and send me your questions. It might be the topic for future episodes. 

Dr. Tea  18:38  
And lastly, if you remember nothing else, remember this. You are in control of your life. See you next time.