A packed schedule doesn’t necessarily mean you’re done for the day. There’s still the matter of returning messages, checking tomorrow’s intake forms, and verifying coverage for the next patient. None of these tasks magically vanish just because your practice offers telehealth.
If you’re a practice owner exploring virtual healthcare services, hiring remote admin staff can keep things in order. MyVA Support can assist with a range of administrative duties, such as managing appointments, contacting patients, verifying coverage, processing intakes, and assisting with billing. The remote team members discussed here perform administrative functions. They won’t be diagnosing, prescribing or making clinical treatment decisions. Those decisions belong to the authorized clinicians at your practice.
Instead of a job description that covers every task you want covered, consider identifying a single responsibility and see if a remote worker can handle it.
What Virtual Healthcare Services Mean for Your Practice
Virtual healthcare can mean several things. A patient might search for it when seeking out a telehealth appointment or a virtual visit with their physician. A practice administrator might be seeking out someone who can perform all the nonclinical duties associated with that appointment. When considering hiring staff, be specific about what you need: remote medical administrative support.
A scheduling coordinator requires some appointment protocols, access to the calendar, a provider’s schedule, and the ability to make notes if something falls outside of the protocols. A clinician requires the qualifications and authority to evaluate the patient and make clinical decisions. These details need to be part of the job description, training, and patient communication.
Healthcare services offered by MyVA Support are focused on administrative support for medical practices and other healthcare entities. The job titles listed on its website include front desk coordinators, scheduling coordinators, insurance verification specialists, intake coordinators, and billing support specialists.
View these as a baseline for discussion around hiring staff. Determine which tasks can go together, how many arrive per day, and who manages them within your office.
Choose a First Support Role for Your Clinic
Spend a week writing down everything that slips through the cracks. Make note of the task itself, the time the task was requested, the reason it got stuck, and the person who finished it. This gives you a clearer picture than, "everyone's too busy."
If most tasks getting stuck are appointment requests, focus on optimizing your scheduling protocols. If most tasks getting stuck are because they require documents that haven't been provided, invest time in refining your intake protocols. If your front desk staff spend their busiest hour answering phone calls and checking insurance information, identify which tasks require immediate attention and which can stay in the queue.
There's a finite amount of time in each day. You can't assume that your virtual assistant will be able to field every phone call while performing a full run of insurance checks. You'll need to set expectations and create processes for when you have more work than a single person can manage.
Scheduling and front desk coordination
Document the requirements for appointment requests. What types of appointments are needed? What types of providers? Which office location will handle the appointment? Under what circumstances do appointments need to be approved prior to scheduling? Include details for rescheduling and for requesting a particular provider.
Determine when a task is complete. When is an appointment request complete? It's not sufficient to simply see it listed on the schedule. Confirm that the right provider is booked, the correct type of visit is selected, and any preparatory steps are completed per your office's protocol.
Intake and insurance follow-through
Create an intake checklist that distinguishes missing administrative information from clinical concerns. Your remote assistant can flag an empty field on a form, but they shouldn't attempt to diagnose why a patient is experiencing certain symptoms.
Establish how and where health insurance verifications are recorded. Who resolves any issues identified during the verification process? Record the date the information was obtained and the source checked. Your remote assistant should utilize approved scripts for delivering information and report any discrepancies regarding coverage or unclear information to a designated person.
Billing and patient messages
Clarify the scope of the billing support role. What standard billing questions can your virtual assistant address? What billing-related documents can your assistant edit? When does a billing issue warrant escalation to your billing manager? Delegate only those responsibilities that your remote worker has the ability and authority to complete.
Identify who is responsible for patient messages. A patient message concerning an appointment could follow an administrative workflow. A patient message inquiring about changing a medication would require prompt routing through your clinic's clinical escalation process.
Support Telehealth Appointments Before and After the Visit
If your clinic provides telehealth services, separate out the administrative parts of the appointment from the consultation. Whether the patient has video visits or in-person care, the healthcare provider makes the clinical decisions. This distinction will make it easier to discuss the support role with your staffing agency and your clinical team.
Determine before the appointment who confirms the booking, checks that required forms are present, and forwards the approved links for joining. Use one set of instructions so that patients aren’t searching for pieces in various messages. Establish how to reach someone if there are issues connecting to the telemedicine platform and how to refer technical issues to the appropriate resources.
Consider a patient calling in because they didn’t receive the meeting link. A staff member following the practice’s procedure might confirm the contact details, resend the approved instructions and document the action. What if the caller also asked if a new symptom could wait until their next appointment? That would require a clinical escalation process. There might also be a scheduling issue that’s been mixed in with the clinical question.
After the visit, an administrative assistant might schedule another appointment based on the documented instructions, or remind the patient to bring in a form. Make sure that those are the expected responsibilities of the position. The clinical explanation should be provided by the care team. This is no less true for telehealth.
Make Privacy Part of the Working Arrangement
Have your privacy or compliance lead review the proposed staffing relationship before sharing patient information. According to HHS, outside entities doing some work that involves protected health information could be considered business associates. Where a business associate relationship applies, the required business associate agreement specifies safeguards and permitted uses of the information. How that works out depends on the nature of the relationship and whether someone is considered a member of the covered entity’s workforce. You can read more about this distinction in the HHS business associate guidance.
MyVA Support says its healthcare onboarding process includes privacy training, confidentiality agreements, and cybersecurity software, which are all items to talk about as you go through the process. But none of those things alone means that each of your practice workflows will meet applicable requirements.
Check access before the first live assignment. Remote access to electronic protected health information must involve appropriate safeguards and restricted access to authorized individuals, according to HHS. The guidance on telecommuting and access control from HHS specifically applies to working from home.
Have your internal point person record which systems have been authorized for use, what roles each person has, the devices being used, the path to report incidents, and what happens when a person leaves the company. Add instructions for exchanging documentation securely through authorized channels. Do not share login credentials just to get someone up to speed. Verify access levels match job responsibilities so employees can complete their work without being granted access they do not need.
Train for the Exceptions, Too
A checklist only helps you up to a certain point. Then you encounter a scenario outside the checklist. Walk through examples with an assistant during onboarding. Two providers have conflicting booking rules. What do you do? Someone calls up angry because they dispute their bill. What do you do? One system has information, but another system has different information. Who do you tell? How do you document the handoff? Who is the backup if the main contact is unavailable? Who does the handoff if you are leaving for the day and you haven’t closed out all your work?
Provide fictitious records or records specifically created for training purposes. For example, provide an appointment request with one of the required intake items missing and have the candidate walk you through what they will document, what they will handle, and what they will escalate. Have them describe the next action after they’ve completed the request, then follow up with the person that owns that particular workflow to see if the answer matches expectations. That can give you insight into additional procedures you’ll want to write up now, before the gap causes problems in live work.
Allow your current staff the flexibility to participate in the process. Your new remote team member may need context you never documented in the past because you always learned on the job. A brief morning standup at the start of the transition period may help convert unwritten processes into written instructions.
Measure Completion, Accuracy, and Capacity
Choose several metrics that relate to the job in question. In scheduling, keep tabs on the number of pending requests, patient wait times for a reply, and how many corrections are needed after booking. In intake, look at the total number of scheduled visits that have reached the preparation deadline without all the required data. In insurance assistance, check on the number of outstanding verifications and their length of time.
Track both volume and quality. Increasing the amount of work processed doesn’t mean much if someone else has to fix the work later. Look at some of the finished tasks and see if you can spot common mistakes. If you do, correct the process or provide additional training.
Ask the on-site staff, too. How has their workload changed since the remote assistant began handling some of their tasks? Are they spending less time on the task you reassigned? Are they receiving clearer handoffs? These are the best sources of information on whether your new process is actually saving time or just moving the workload elsewhere.
Discuss a Defined Support Role With MyVA Support
MyVA Support hires and oversees remote staff based in Latin America. Its healthcare offering includes onboarding, ongoing management, and support for expanding teams.
Begin with the number of hours you expect the staff to work each week, the tools currently in use, and the first task you want to delegate. Present a brief description of the role and three or four pain points that you need help with. Inquire about how you’ll determine if someone can do the job, how the candidate will get up to speed, and how problems will be handled. Discuss pricing against the proposed hours and responsibilities. Once you’ve done all that, you can decide whether to expand the role.
To test the waters with MyVA Support, identify the initial workflow. For instance, take a single backlog, name one person who’ll oversee it, and clarify what it means for an item to be finished. This approach will help you evaluate whether remote administration is right for your clinic.
