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How To Know When It’s Time to Call a Virtual Assistant
Many practitioners of the healing arts are accustomed to leaving the office late, with a ton of paperwork left undone. There always seems to be more to do than there is time in which to do it.
Many practitioners of the healing arts are accustomed to leaving the office late, with a ton of paperwork left undone. There always seems to be more to do than there is time in which to do it. A practitioner considers it a fortunate occurrence if the treatment/progress notes get written the same day as the visit. The practice has become a vicious circle of seeing patients, hoping to catch up, and leaving without getting it all done.
My clients and other practitioners that I’ve talked with all tell me the same things: “I don’t have time to get it all done. I’m months behind.” These are the tasks that I’ve been told need the most attention:
- Daily bookkeeping (entering income and expenses)
- Cleaning up contacts from pieces of paper, business cards, or emails and compiling a database from the information
- Desktop publishing, i.e. creating brochures, gift certificates, etc.
- More marketing
- Contacting insurance companies to see about getting on the panels
- Credentialing
- Creation of a client database (for those who don’t use a software program designed for therapists)
- Billing
Are any of these tasks on your list? The whole point to being in business for yourself is to be able to run things in ways that work best for you, and being able to make a profit. Can you say that you are meeting both of these goals? If you are doing more work with patients than administration tasks, then you are successful; but, what if you are one of the ones who is constantly bogged down with paperwork and unfinished tasks? You didn’t spend all that time in school just to try to keep up with paperwork and phone calls. It may be time to call for help.
A virtual assistant with a healthcare or mental health background would be able to take that paperwork off your hands. It wouldn’t matter if this person was in the same geographic location as you. There are many ways to take care of your administrative needs while remaining HIPPA compliant.
A virtual assistant can remotely access your computer and work directly with your files. An alternative to that would be for both of you to have the same set of files, and transfer new data monthly. There are clearing houses that electronically file insurance claims for a variety of health plans, or claims can be submitted directly through the websites of the individual health plans. There is one website that I know of that offers HIPPA compliant storage and file sharing capabilities; I’m sure there are more out there that I’m not aware of.
Paperwork such as EOBs and intake forms can be faxed directly to the virtual assistant for processing and data entry. According to HIPPA guidelines, a stand-alone fax machine is a safe transmitter of data. In addition, data can be transferred using CDs, or simply through regular mail, although that would not be efficient for time-sensitive material.
Virtual assistants can call for eligibility and benefits, get authorizations, follow up on unpaid claims, make reminder phone calls to patients, or return calls for you.
There is really no need these days to resort to the added expense and bother of hiring employees when most of your administrative needs can be taken care of by a virtual assistant. Partnering with a virtual assistant, you would only pay for the exact amount of time worked, and be billed monthly. There are no tax or insurance expenses, no training (other than familiarizing the virtual assistant to your way of doing things), no more worrying about whether or not your employee will be sick or late, or quit after a few months. There are even some virtual assistants who tailor their hours to match yours, and who work evenings and weekends.
Being in a different time zone can be an added benefit in working with a virtual assistant, especially if the virtual assistant is on the west coast. All other time zones would fall within the virtual assistant’s workday; the only snag comes when there are things that need to be done early in the morning – this would be sleep time for the west coast virtual assistant!
The question, then, would be this: How do you know when it’s time to work with a virtual assistant? And the answer would be: When you are losing sleep, losing business, or losing personal time because of your unfinished administrative tasks, then it is time to make that call.
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