What Is a Virtual Assistant for Medical Practice?

A Virtual Assistant for Medical Practice is an independent contractor working for your practice off site as a receptionist and aid. Their job is to handle numerous administrative tasks, allowing you to focus on patient care.

While a Virtual Assistant can take care of many tasks for a medical practice, their core duties typically revolve around patient billing, dealing with insurance companies, and scheduling and canceling appointments for patients. Their scope of work can include many more administrative duties if you agree on them. Many of these individuals have nursing backgrounds or HIPPA training, so you can count on them to assist with completing some minor medical tasks, such as processing prescription refill requests.

There are many reasons why you should hire a Virtual Assistant for your medical practice over a full-time assistant, but here are the crucial ones:

• Pay only for hours worked—Rather than having someone on your monthly payroll regardless of the amount of the amount of work, you’ll be paying a VA per hour, which is much more cost-effective
• No overhead costs—you don’t have to provide any benefits, insurance, or PTO. Plus, there’s no need to provide office space or a PC/laptop
• Global talent pool—since you’re hiring remotely, you can contract a VA from any corner of the world. This means you can find a skilled VA with a medical background willing to do the job at a fraction of the cost of a local full-time employee

What Does a Virtual Assistant for Medical Practice Do?

Virtual assistants offer a wide variety of services. Their responsibilities may vary drastically depending on the skillset they offer and the medical practice that contracts them. 

That said, here are the common duties a Medical Virtual Assistant is expected to perform:

• Answering patient inquiries—The VA is expected to respond to patient questions via phone, email, or social media. Their scope of work may also include following up with patients, scheduling appointments and checkups, and referring them to the proper medical professional within your organization
• Handling medical records—A Medical VA can also be in charge of maintaining and updating patient records
• Checking insurance coverage—VAs can review insurance coverage and communicate with your patients’ insurance companies to shorten the wait time for verification by sending the claims right away
• Managing your schedule—Patients often cancel or reschedule appointments, and a good portion of them never show up, leaving you with empty slots. The VA can take care of updating your schedule, to ensure that there no empty slots and that there is no overlapping of appointments in your schedule
• Handling medical supplies logistics— A Medical VA can also keep track of supplies at your practice and order new items when necessary, allowing you to focus on admitting more patients without worrying about the logistical aspects of the job

How Much Does It Cost to Hire a Virtual Assistant for Medical Practice?

The amount of money a Virtual Assistant earns depends on numerous factors, including their experience, medical background, education, and geographical location. The average annual salary of a Medical Virtual Assistant in the United States is $37,000.

If you opt to hire a Virtual Assistant instead of an on-site one for your medical practice, you can expect a much lower cost for the VA’s services. Full-time employees receive a full paycheck each month, regardless of the amount of work they do (excluding overtime, of course). In other words, even if they’re productive for only three hours a day, you’d still be paying for the full eight.

A Virtual Assistant, on the other hand, is paid only for the hours worked. Additionally, you don’t need to provide a VA with office space and equipment, as they work remotely. Another perk of having a Virtual Assistant is related to not worrying about paying for additional benefits, such as bonuses or PTO.

Expert Tips on Hiring a Virtual Assistant for Medical Practice

Having a Virtual Assistant for Medical Practice as a part of your team comes with numerous perks, but the road to hiring one is not so simple. This person will have to work with confidential medical documents, so it is necessary to ensure it is someone trustworthy and reliable. Here are some tips that should help you with the hiring process:

1. Tailor a job ad to your needs—If you want to ward off unqualified candidates, you need to be as specific as possible when describing the exact responsibilities the VA will need to take on
2. Spend the time necessary to find the ideal VA—You should be aware that contracting the perfect VA for your medical practice will take some time. Patience is key, so it’s best to avoid hiring one of the first candidates who seems okay. Investing time in the search for the perfect candidate will pay off in the long run because they will be able to complete tasks efficiently, saving you a lot of time and money
3. Assess numerous candidates— It’s paramount that you test the candidates because candidates’ portfolios often aren’t an accurate reflection of their skills and capabilities. If you hire a VA based on their portfolio/profile alone, you might end up having to oversee everything they do and fix their mistakes daily, which defeats the purpose of hiring a VA

The good news is that there is a way to speed up the hiring process and avoid dealing with everything manually. Workello—a fully-automated applicant tracking system— can help you cut costs and hire the most qualified candidates by streamlining the hiring process.

Hire a Reliable Virtual Assistant for Medical Practice, 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 Virtual Assistants for Medical Practice 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 [keyword] 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 VA for Medical Practice 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 5 VA for Medical Practice tests for free.