Examples of how our Medical Assistant services could help a medical practice
The Scenario:
A private psychiatry practice with multiple mental health professionals, providing individual and couples counselling to adults. During the pandemic and lock-down, the practice experienced a growing demand for appointments, especially remote appointments held over the phone or via Zoom. The practice has taken on more employees to cover this demand. Current staff also had to work from home throughout pandemic restrictions and the practice has now incorporated this into it's working method.
Business Challenges:
The recent growth of the business, while positive, is a double-edged sword. To accommodate more employees and appointments, the business is faced with increased overhead costs from hiring more office space and equipment, which could reduce profits or have the costs passed on to clients which would make the private service less competitive.
Continuing with their remote working method may reduce costs and handle virtual appointments to an extent, but the business needs to ensure potential and existing client calls are answered wherever colleagues are working. With psychiatrists working varied days and hours, the business needs a reliable service to book appointments and take detailed messages for colleagues to action when they are available.
The nature of medical practice work means there are a lot of administrative tasks regarding; managing patient communications and records, digitising confidential meeting notes, accounts work and liaising with insurance companies and other medical professionals. The increased workload means that capacity is being taken away from professionals’ service delivery, having to deal with time consuming tasks that require frequent monitoring.
The fragmented working of the team is causing details and initial enquiries to be missed as there is poor internal communication between staff around workloads, colleague availability, annual leave etc.
Increased levels of non-payment are taking up employee’s time having to chase clients and insurance providers via phone and email, with communications being missed as there is no dedicated admin team to manage inboxes or direct enquiries to the right contacts to avoid confusion.
Solutions
Our core service in tandem with our Medical Assistants is Telephone Answering – our teams take the time to learn about your business and reliably follow your instructions for handling new and current enquiries, appointment bookings and re-scheduling. This information is then emailed to the relevant contact for your action when needed, and we can handle any follow-up calls or emails requesting information.
Our Medical Assistant teams are already set-up with equipment and office space, having extensive experience across several medical sectors from psychiatry, dental to chiropody, private GP’s Practices to Gynaecology to name a few. We can handle every step of your patients’ experience with your business; From sending initial enquiry forms for new patients, confirming appointments, sending virtual meeting links and any documents for self-service psychiatric tools.
We aim to make the initial transition to our services as seamless as possible. We have a good working knowledge of several main systems used already, such as DGL, Heydoc, Cliniko, Powerdiary, Practice Pal and more. We also have experience with medico-legal documents and processes. Once set up our teams share the task of managing these systems, providing a personal assistant team for the practice who are all trained on the specifics of your day-to-day.
As well as supporting the patient-facing tasks of your practice, Medical Assistants are designed to improve your practices’ working processes and optimise your employee’s efficiency. We take care of all the small tasks to make your working life easier such as: Managing inboxes and filing emails for specific contacts, co-ordinating and communicating employee diaries, and communicating treatment room availability. You can delegate tasks such as liaising with GPs and other health professionals to save you from distracting email chains. We can transcribe and digitise documents so employees can access them remotely and securely – especially important when working with medico-legal documents which our teams have years of experience assisting on.
Take away the hassle and uncomfortableness of chasing payment from insurance providers and patients – our teams take a polite yet direct approach via phone, email and letter to keep your revenue coming in and keep the focus of your employees on providing impactful aid to your patients.
Outcomes
Leveraging the power of remote Medical Assistants saves money instantly by not burdening your practice with renting office space, hiring equipment and all the hidden costs associated with recruitment and the ongoing management of HR issues like covering periods of sickness or holiday. We understand that your dream of running your own practice doesn’t include the burdens of health and safety requirements for offices or ordering stationary – with our already set up teams you don’t have to worry about the small things.
Using work sharing methods mean that your calls are always answered, and all your admin work is consistently covered. Having a competent remote reception team that can take bookings and provide answers to queries creates a professional and reassuring impression for your patients, increasing your long-term client retention and word of mouth recommendations.
Having your inboxes organised and calendars managed will free you from time-consuming work that is often left until out of hours – wouldn’t it be nice to get your evenings and weekends back while improving your practice management processes
You and your colleagues will benefit from better organisation and internal communication – knowing where and when your colleagues are working at a glance can give you, as a Director or Business Owner, an over-arching view of your practice’s progress. You can then look to further expand your practice with our fully scalable services, backed by insightful patient and practice data, compiled into easy-to-understand reports.
For more examples of the tasks our hard-working teams can take on, head to our Medical Assistants service page, or to discuss your specific needs you can contact us, or call us on 020 3303 3303.