The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the healthcare sector to move most of their practices online. In a survey, around 40 percent of consumers reported that they would continue to use telehealth going forward. The loosening of HIPAA privacy policies, the emergence of new tech, and consumer attitude towards telehealth has brought about the surge of telehealth. Most patients nowadays feel more comfortable going to online consultations. As a result, most healthcare practitioners operate a majority of their practices online. These events gave rise to the need to create secure systems for patient coordination and for the storing of electronic health records (EHR). This virtual setup posed new challenges to most healthcare practitioners and made it imperative for them to seek help from a healthcare virtual assistant.
What is a Virtual Medical Assistant?
A virtual medical assistant works remotely by providing back-end support to healthcare practitioners. There are numerous tasks that can be assigned to a healthcare virtual assistant. Those include administrative, customer service, marketing, and online business management tasks. Medical VAs are often tasked to follow up with patients, manage medical records, coordinate with insurance providers, and respond to customer inquiries.
How to Choose a Virtual Medical Assistant
Hiring your first medical virtual assistant requires a lot of thought. Here is some guidance on choosing the right virtual assistant for your medical practice:
Know what you need.
Running a medical practice entails a mountain of tasks to accomplish. Before delegating, you must first determine which non-medical tasks are getting in the way of your productivity. First, make a list of all the tasks that you need help with. Once you have a list, you can start searching what types of skills are associated with those tasks.
Prioritize organizational skills.
High attention to detail and exemplary organizational skills should be at the top of your list when screening your VA candidates. Patients’ health, life, and safety are often entrusted to healthcare practitioners. Because of this, there’s little to no room for error when handling a patient’s records, medication, and other important details.
Look for a registered healthcare practitioner.
Avoid starting from scratch with your new hire by leveraging the expertise of registered healthcare practitioners. The Philippines is a great place to find registered nurses, medical technologists, psychologists, and many more. These professionals have worked in the healthcare industry in their home country, so they already have an idea of how medical systems work. Medical VAs that are registered healthcare professionals can be integrated easily into your current business workflow.
Check for HIPAA compliance.
One of the roadblocks to finding administrative assistants in the healthcare industry is the HIPAA law. HIPAA is a US legislation which affords data privacy and security provisions to protect patients’ medical information. Failing to comply with the standards set by HIPAA can result in humongous monetary penalties. On top of that, medical practitioners can also lose their licenses. As a practitioner, you must protect your reputation and your license. It’s imperative that you hire virtual assistants who have undergone HIPAA training such as the ones from Virtudesk.
With outsourcing becoming a popular solution in the healthcare industry, you don’t want to miss out on opportunities for improving your healthcare practice. If you want to leverage the low labor costs of offshore virtual assistants, you can start by searching for HIPAA-compliant VA companies like Virtudesk.