What Is a Healthcare Virtual Assistant?

Working in healthcare involves hours dedicated to administrative tasks. While some of the tasks can be handled by the reception staff, having another employee to enhance patients’ experience is preferable. 

Since hiring another full-time worker might not be easy on your pocket, there’s an economical alternative—hiring a Healthcare Virtual Assistant. 

These professionals work remotely and can help you with a variety of tasks you or the receptionists don’t have time for or aren’t skilled at, such as providing patient support via email, answering patient queries, refilling prescriptions, notifying patients about appointment schedules, maintaining Electronic Medical Records (EMR), reviewing insurance documents, and billing for medical services.

Hiring a Virtual Health Assistant is a great solution for medical practitioners who have just begun their private practice and cannot afford in-house personnel. Since you pay them on an hourly basis, you are in control of how much workload you will outsource this way. You can use their help only for the part you can’t accomplish yourself and pay them accordingly.

A Virtual Assistant can adjust their schedule the way you need them to, which wouldn’t be possible with a full-time employee, who is usually available during specific hours only.

What Does a Healthcare Virtual Assistant Do?

The exact daily duties of Healthcare Virtual Assistants depend on the employer, but here are some of the most common Medical Virtual Assistant services:

• Answering patients’ queries—By having assistance in responding to administrative queries from patients, you get to dedicate time to your core objectives, such as enhancing your practice and relationships with patients, as well as growing your business. Instead of paying a full-time employee for an 8-hour shift to ensure patient satisfaction, you can save money by engaging someone based on your actual needs
• Scheduling appointments—As a business owner, you are unlikely to succeed in making your business thrive if you’re constantly dealing with piled-up administration work, such as taking care of the appointment calendar and sending reminders for the appointments. Once you hire a Healthcare Virtual Assistant, you can rest assured that everything will be running smoothly since their organizational skills are what sells their services on the market—they want to be re-engaged, and that’s unlikely to happen if they are not neat, punctual, and detailed
• Maintaining Electronic Medical Records—In healthcare, it’s of utmost importance to store all information properly and with great confidentiality. Healthcare Virtual Assistants are professionals who are usually well-organized and experienced in using electronic health record (EHR) software by default, so you won’t have to waste time on any additional training

How Much Does It Cost To Hire a Healthcare Virtual Assistant?

When deciding how much to pay Healthcare Virtual Assistants, bear in mind that their rates depend on previous experience, location, specialization, the number and the nature of daily tasks, and similar factors.

The U.S. reports show that the average annual salary of a Healthcare Virtual Assistant is $57,242 a year. This means Virtual Assistants cost employers considerably less than full-time employees. 

This is not the only motive for business owners to search for remote assistance. Here’s why else you should hire a Virtual Assistant:

• You get access to a global talent pool—When hiring in-office staff, you are usually restricted to candidates in your area, but hiring remotely means you don’t have to miss out on top-performing candidates just because they’re from another continent
• No coaching headache—Virtual Assistants usually have a multitude of skills they have already perfected since it’s how they compete on the market. If you hire a Virtual Assistant, you will get a professional with both soft and technical skills that requires no or little additional training, which saves you time, effort, and money
• You get to pay them for how much work they do—Hiring a full-time employee implies additional expenses, such as paying for their off time and sick leaves. By hiring Virtual Assistants, you get to pay only for their output

Expert Tips on Hiring a Healthcare Virtual Assistant

While engaging a Healthcare Virtual Assistant will help you with lower-priority tasks, keep in mind that they also need to be reliable. A Virtual Assistant in medical practice is expected to deal with highly sensitive information, such as diagnoses and laboratory reports, and therefore has to be extremely cautious, professional, highly skilled, and dependable.

Finding a trustworthy assistant can be challenging when hiring remotely, but it is not an insurmountable issue. Our team expanded from 1 to 45 people in just 18 months—take a look at what tips we followed:

1. Let candidates know what you expect without vague statements. This way, you ensure the number of unqualified candidates misjudging themselves as competent is reduced. This is especially important when hiring remotely, as you’re reaching out to more potential candidates and expecting a large number of applications
2. Test and assess all skills that are crucial for the job. Candidates’ success as your potential hire is indeterminable based on portfolio only. The most relevant predictor of how they’d perform is the recruitment test results, so feel free to test all skills that are vital for this position in your company
3. Make sure your new hire is able to work under minimal supervision. If this means you’ll have to extend your search since you can’t find a candidate reliable enough, then do it—it might seem a time-drain now, but it will prove to be productive in the future. Remember that your goal is to entrust someone with the tasks you would otherwise perform yourself
4. Use an automated hiring funnel to organize and speed up the process. Recruitment can easily go all topsy-turvy, especially when receiving applications from all over the world. Setting up a hiring funnel can simplify and expedite the process by automating many of its stages, such as notifying candidates of their progress and answering their queries. It also allows both you and the candidate to monitor the progress of each selection phase

Hire a Reliable Healthcare Virtual Assistant, Faster

You can think of Workello as the perfect virtual hiring assistant. Our fully automated hiring funnel is the product of countless hours, over $100,000, and dozens of iterations. With Workello, you can automate testing, scheduling, and email correspondence with candidates so you can focus on scaling your business and maximizing revenue.

Here’s how Workello makes hiring Healthcare Virtual Assistants a breeze:

1. Sign up for a free Workello account and launch your automated, pre-configured hiring funnel in less than 3 minutes
2. Post your job ads across LinkedIn, Monster, Facebook, Indeed, and all your other hiring channels and link to your Workello job ad
3. See all your candidates in a single, unified Workello dashboard, regardless of which hiring channel they applied from
4. Reject, test, interview, and send offers to Healthcare Virtual Assistants with a single click
5. Filter out unqualified candidates with Workello’s built-in testing feature
6. Trigger automated emails and move candidates through your hiring funnel simply by changing their status from a drop-down menu
7. Minimize transactional questions by enabling candidates to see a live status page that tells them exactly which stage of your hiring funnel they are in

Don’t waste hundreds of hours looking for a perfect Healthcare VA that’s supposed to save you valuable time. Set up a fully automated hiring funnel with Workello, cut your hiring costs by 50%, and start accepting ideal candidates today!

Sign up now and review 10 Healthcare Virtual Assistant tests for free.