Hiring and keeping front desk staff is a grind, prior authorizations take a lot of time, and a missing scheduler can cause a practice to fall behind on appointments for days. This is why practice managers end up researching virtual health care companies. It's not that they want to become telehealth providers themselves. It's that delivering high-quality care includes everything wrapped around the visit, and their existing staff can't always keep up.
When you look up virtual health care companies, two very different kinds of business appear in the results. One kind of company delivers care to patients. The other type of business never treats a patient at all. It will provide staff for your practice, take phone calls, and handle administrative authorization work so you don't have to spend your Thursday afternoons wading through a sea of prior auth requests.
MyVA Support’s healthcare staffing service belongs to that second group. For a medical practice or specialty clinic, the question is which work a remote team member could take off your plate, and who will support that person once they're hired.
How Managed Staffing Works for a Medical Practice Here is the DIY option: hire a remote worker from a job board and run everything yourself, the HR, the tech, the payroll, the billing. It works if you already have the recruiting and supervision capacity to spare. Plenty of practices don't.
Or here is the managed option: A managed staffing company like MyVA Support finds and screens remote workers in Latin America, and handles much of the administration around the placement.
MyVAS does the onboarding and training. MyVAS tech people load the remote staff's PCs with cybersecurity compliance software. MyVAS handles payroll and bills you. MyVAS keeps track of how well the staff member performs over time.
You control how the work gets done, just like with an in-person hire at your own front desk. The practice still needs to explain its workflows, approve access and give the assistant someone to contact when an exception comes up. A staffing company can't guess which appointment slots you're holding open or who can approve a scheduling change.
The selling point is relieving the admin burden, but really the point is having a managed option. DIY remote hiring can go wrong when there is no one to train the hire on the call scripts, notice the calls going unanswered, or get the computer working. Managed staffing gives structure to what otherwise is a DIY exercise.
The Roles Behind a Virtual Care Team MyVA Support's stated experience with software, such as Athenahealth, Kareo, or AdvancedMD does not guarantee that its candidates will be experts on your particular EHR setup. It's important to outline all queues, forms, and phone responsibilities that a patient care coordinator will be managing, and then use this outline to build the onboarding experience that will provide the right system access and workflow guidance.
Here's a list of administrative support roles outside the exam room:
Patient Care/Front Desk Coordinator: Connects with patients and answers incoming calls Scheduling Coordinator: Manages the patient scheduling process, including confirming appointments and managing cancellations Insurance Verification Specialist: Confirms benefits and eligibility and tracks insurance authorizations Patient Intake Coordinator: Handles patient onboarding and preliminary information gathering Billing & Administrative Support: Assists with billing coordination and patient record maintenance Patient Communication Support: Handles pre-approved follow-ups and reminders A patient care coordinator is an administrative position.
For example, a patient may have a chronic condition and may have requested to be contacted about scheduling a follow-up appointment. The patient care coordinator can make these calls to patients to schedule their requested follow-up appointment. If the patient starts to talk about new symptoms or an adjustment to their medication, the coordinator would need to refer these questions to the appropriate clinical members of the care team per practice protocol.
MyVA Support works with a diverse clientele, including: physicians, dental practices, chiropractic offices, med spas, mental health practices, and multi-location practices.
Specialty Care and Mental Health Practices Have Different Staffing Needs In hiring your admin assistant(s), make sure the company has experience staffing positions in your specialty. Each medical specialty has its own needs, and the duties of the position will differ, too.
Specialty Care Practices that rely heavily on referrals may need someone dedicated to making calls to insurance companies and keeping track of authorization status. When this duty falls by the wayside, authorizations will pile up and hold up appointments.
Mental Health Practices often see patients for care plans with recurring visits over several months. It may be common for the front desk staff to receive clinical concerns during an appointment reminder call. The staff will need to know the appropriate language to use and have a dependable means to get that information to the licensed therapist. They also need to know the process for handling urgent calls or messages. This is another example of training that goes beyond the realm of being kind on the phone, although kindness is still important.
Dental Offices often get large numbers of phone calls, many of which involve insurance or scheduling issues.
Med spas may focus more heavily on consultations with calls to follow up.
No matter what type of practice you own, hiring virtual assistants should be designed to personalize the support around your workflow. The admin assistant is not a position where a one-size-fits-all approach works.
Telehealth and Connected Care: Staffing Around the Visit For practices offering a virtual care service, the HHS telehealth workflow guidance helps practices plan staffing for scheduling, check-in, documentation, billing and follow-up.
Appointments don’t happen in a vacuum, for either patients or practices. The administrative processes surrounding the patient-provider encounter are just as critical to delivering complete patient care as the appointment itself. Patients expect multiple ways to make or reschedule appointments, submit forms or medical records, and pose general administrative questions. They expect an easy process for connecting to telehealth services and need help when they have questions or technical difficulty. Software can send links and flag incomplete forms. The practice still needs someone responsible for following up on missing information and helping patients when the automated steps don't resolve the problem.
Your practice may need to send appointment confirmations, collect health insurance card details and verify eligibility before the visit. Patients also need a clear way to contact their providers, whether care is virtual, in-person, or both. All of this is an intricate web of support, connecting to the visit.
Primary Care and Urgent Care Visits For example, in a practice offering video visits, a remote coordinator might follow up the afternoon before a telemedicine appointment if a patient has a scheduled checkup or preventive care visit and has not yet submitted required intake forms. Staff should not decide what medical care a patient needs, but should mark missing information for the clinic.
After the telehealth appointment, staff can schedule follow-up appointments, relay approved instructions from the care plan, and route questions about pharmacy paperwork to the care team. They do not diagnose conditions, choose a treatment plan or prescribe medication or change a prescription. Those decisions belong with the primary care provider or other qualified care providers. If there are technical difficulties during the telehealth visit, a defined handoff protocol should be followed. In such situations, it will not be appropriate for staff to determine the most effective next steps in patient care.
An urgent care office might receive a call about booking an allergy appointment that also raises other health concerns. Staff should have clearly defined parameters for appointments and questions and when they need to escalate to clinical staff to determine appropriate care options. They should also clearly understand the telehealth protocols and know when to contact clinical staff during a patient telehealth visit for urgent care.
Staff need an approved process for checking the patient’s insurance plans and verifying benefits. Questions may include:
Does the health plan cover this particular type of visit? Are telehealth visits covered by this insurance company? Is the clinic in-network for this plan? What are the copays? Staff can flag issues they cannot resolve. They should not assume coverage just because the patient is scheduling a telehealth appointment.
Administrative staff help patients get care by coordinating appointments, information and messages around services the clinic already offers, whether virtual or in-person.
Patient Privacy and Protected Health Information If any remote employees are going to be handling billing or scheduling duties, they most likely will be accessing a fair amount of PHI, which makes data privacy absolutely critical. Ask how the staffing arrangement fits your practice’s HIPAA responsibilities. A trustworthy partner should be able to answer questions about this process, not simply offer vague answers like, “they’re used to working in the medical field.” Privacy protection isn’t an afterthought, so ask questions to get detailed answers. MyVA Support says its onboarding includes privacy measures such as compliance software installed on your assistant’s computer through its IT team, NDAs, and PHI training. MyVAS has an FAQ page that goes into more detail about this in case you want to learn more before even reaching out.
While you might be saving yourself time and effort by hiring remote help, you must still be sure of who has access to your systems and information. Only permit what’s necessary for each role. Make sure that you’re talking to your compliance adviser, and document the arrangement. Keep in mind the HHS distinction between workforce members and business associates .
Also make sure to have a business associate agreement in place when required. An NDA will not substitute for a BAA.
Choosing a Partner for Your Healthcare Needs The following questions can help you see what a staffing company provides beyond a resume: Where is the candidate pool coming from and who is screening them? Who manages payroll and IT security? What's the turnover rate? What happens if we decide the placement isn't a good fit? How will EHR access and training work? What agreements are needed, and what's included in the service fee?
Ask about working hours as well. MyVAS describes availability during agreed office hours. Confirm the schedule for your role, including who covers breaks or an absence. An agency's support availability and an individual assistant's working schedule aren't the same thing.
After you ask these questions, match the responses to your current needs. If you find your front office staff is too busy, you may want to start with a scheduling role, and then assess your hold times and no-show rates 60 days later. If your cash flow is your primary concern, you may want to begin with insurance verification and billing support. Check accuracy and unresolved work alongside speed, so a shorter call queue doesn't hide messages sent to the wrong place.
Bring your busiest hours, unfinished work and the role you need filled when you contact MyVA Support .
