It’s not uncommon to feel like you could have accomplished more during your workday. You know how it goes: “If only there were two of me!” Unfortunately, 3D printing isn’t that advanced yet.
All jokes aside, it makes sense to seek out feasible ways to get (often tedious) tasks done. That’s where virtual assistants come in.
With a virtual assistant, busy healthcare professionals can get more done in less time, which can boost your bottom line as well as patient (and employee) satisfaction.
Curious? Let’s explore the top 13 benefits of hiring a virtual assistant for healthcare.
[Related: Considering Using AI in Your Healthcare Practice? Here’s Where to Start]
1. Saving Time
It’s a fact — time is one of the most valuable assets you can protect. Especially with a virtual assistant for healthcare. Think of it as a virtual front office.
Money is certainly important too, but we’ll address that later in this piece. But as for time, once you lose it, there’s no coming back. It’s gone for good, so you should preserve it at all costs (pun intended).
So when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant, you must hire someone who knows how to delegate and get the job done. Your virtual assistant should complete requests efficiently and answer questions concisely. Then, because you’re a healthcare professional, you can spend your time on treating patients rather than handling administrative tasks.
2. Turning Over Administrative Tasks
To reiterate what we stated above, you shouldn’t have to spend time on administrative tasks as a healthcare professional.
Virtual assistants can handle everything from emails to pop-up chat box requests to phone calls to calendar management. They can essentially work the scope of whatever virtual healthcare tasks you hire them to tackle: bookkeeping, marketing, web design and more.
3. Growing Your Practice
Virtual assistants are a fantastic, low-risk solution for growing your practice.
It’s simple: Growth requires capital, and virtual assistants are substantially cost-effective compared to hiring, training and paying an actual employee.
Reducing costs lends more money to invest back into your practice — but more importantly, into your current and potential patients.
4. Maintaining a Consistent Online Presence
If you run a small practice, this benefit is especially important because you need to get your name out there. And a virtual front office can help you do just that.
There’s no getting around the fact that having an active website, Google Business profile and socials (think Meta, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) is time-intensive. Your virtual assistant can handle posting regularly and keeping all those channels up to date.
5. Generating Leads
Whether through inbound campaigns to your website, social media accounts or website contact forms, lead generation is a very time-consuming — albeit invaluable — task. A virtual assistant can sort through your leads, determine their value and add potential patients to your database.
6. Producing Content
You want to be an authority who people in your industry look to. On that note, researching and creating content about your services can be taxing and distracting.
Why? Because you’re busy performing the actual services.
So, if you want to add value to your customers’ (or more appropriately, your patients’) experience, let a virtual front office handle it. Specifically, a virtual assistant can kick-start your content creation process, starting from market research to publishing. In turn, you drive traffic to your website — and boost your bottom line.
7. Increasing Productivity
Are you holding off on hiring new healthcare staff? Maybe it’s too expensive to bring on new employees, or you don’t have time to find qualified prospects. Perhaps you simply don’t have room for them in your office or clinic.
Unfortunately, this hesitance may lead to your practice suffering due to lack of help. And your current staff can get only so much done in a day.
With a virtual assistant, you gain an extra, low-cost pair of hands. This bolsters your productivity levels. Plus, you don’t have to stop at just one virtual assistant — you can hire as many as you want or need!
In fact, the more virtual assistants you have, the better. As a result, you improve your practice’s overall productivity levels.
8. Managing Your Books
This benefit may come as a surprise because we don’t generally associate bookkeeping with virtual assistants. But bookkeeping is certainly possible with one!
Whether you need a hand with invoicing, paying bills, organizing payroll data or managing other financial matters, you can get timely help with a virtual assistant.
9. Avoiding Legal Disputes
Labor laws are particularly strict in the U.S. And that sometimes makes it difficult to let go of a real-life employee who isn’t performing well. There must be something seriously wrong with their output, or you could suffer a sudden employee lawsuit.
However, labor laws don’t always apply to virtual assistants — afterall, they’re digital humans. In turn, you have more leeway when it comes to who you keep on your team.
But be careful to not take advantage of this. Avoiding lawsuits is a major plus, but high employee turnover is a bad look. So try to ease the strain on your current employees.
10. Gaining and Maintaining Patient
This benefit is a bit different than generating leads but equally important.
Whether you gain most of your patients through word of mouth, website contract forms or something else, maintaining them can be a hefty task. That’s especially true if you have a lot of them!
A virtual front office assistant can not only help you gain patients, but also maintain your relationships with them. Thanks to seamlessly consistent communication, you can monitor your patients’ status much easier with a virtual assistant than without.
11. Taking Care of Patients
Showing patients care and support is more important than ever. If you have a virtual assistant, you can better serve them in these ways:
- Promptly addressing their questions and concerns
- Crafting email responses
- Checking in with pre-visit requirements
- Following up with detailed post-visit summaries
- Handling complaints and requests
12. Improving Your Processes and Services
It’s never a bad thing to speed up your processes, as long as doing so doesn’t jeopardize quality care.
A virtual assistant is essentially an employee who never sleeps, so you get more done in a smaller amount of time. That also means there’s more time for employees to improve services through continuing education — whether that involves monitoring markets, listening to feedback, attending conferences or something else.
13. Having Peace of Mind
This benefit is hard to beat.
When you have someone (well, something) who can faithfully carry out important tasks, your stress level inevitably goes way down. And to put it simply, multitasking just isn’t as effective as most people think. That extra help from someone you trust and rely on helps you focus on your patients instead of darting from one task to the next.
[Related: 5 Patient Engagement Strategies For Your Healthcare Practice]
Contact Wendi for a Personalized Healthcare Virtual Assistant
You’re sure to find more benefits of hiring a virtual assistant than we can list here. But if you’re sold and ready to hire your own virtual assistant for healthcare, contact Wendi.
We offer cutting-edge AI healthcare assistance that streamlines your tasks and helps you accomplish more. Patient health and satisfaction are top priorities — and we’re here to help you gain them.
To learn more about Wendi, schedule a free demo today!
Featured image via Pixabay
