How Virtual Medical Receptionists Can Benefit Your Healthcare Business

Nowadays, a work-from-home arrangement for medical receptionists seems like an ambitious prospect that provides little advantage to a clinic. On the contrary, your clinic can gain a lot from having virtual medical receptionists — perhaps more than it could from in-person medical receptionists.

Here’s how.

What is a “medical receptionist”?

Medical receptionists are staff that attends your clinic’s front desk. They do everything that receptionists do in general; however, they specialize in managing and streamlining the healthcare experience.

Here are some of the main features and tasks of medical receptionists:

• Welcoming patients
• Coordinating with providers
• Scheduling patient appointments
• HIPAA-compliant

“Virtual medical receptionists” are basically medical receptionists who attend your front desk remotely. Their main difference is their work setup; otherwise, they perform all the tasks and functions of in-person medical receptionists.

Benefits of having virtual medical receptionists

Transitioning your medical receptionists to a remote setup may seem like a negligible change. However, it actually yields many benefits that can significantly enhance your clinics’ workflow.

Delegate administrative work

Your providers can feel swamped by the administrative tasks they have to do on top of their actual work. Over time, they may suffer from burnout, and the quality of their work can deteriorate.

You can help them by delegating their administrative work to virtual medical receptionists. With sufficient training, they can:

• Answer phone calls
• Respond to emails
• Schedule appointments
• Process payments
• Verify insurance information

Since they work remotely, your virtual medical receptionists may perform with more energy than they would if they worked on-site. However, make sure to have a discussion with your front desk team on which administrative responsibilities they can shoulder.

By taking out administrative work from your providers’ plates, they can feel far less stressed and perform better.

Increase front desk utilization

Your front desk’s productivity can vary with how busy your business gets. If your clinic faces low traffic, your receptionists become underutilized. This can become even more problematic when you manage multiple clinics with varying levels of traffic. Some clinics may have lower front desk utilization than others. In the long run, this may incur unnecessary expenses.

With the right receptionist software, your virtual medical receptionists can manage multiple front desks at the same time. This means you can:

• Fully utilize and increase the ROI of your receptionists
• Handle all your healthcare locations with only a single front desk team
• Reinvest your cost savings into other expenses

Decrease receptionist stress

A research study on general practice receptionists affirmed the stressful nature of the role, with sources of stress including:

• Difficult patients
• Pressure in work
• Challenges in scheduling appointments

While the study took place in 1999, medical receptionists still face the same problems today. The difference is that work-from-home options are now possible for front desk roles.

By transitioning your medical receptionists to a remote setup, you can significantly decrease their stress. Letting them work from the comfort of their homes may greatly alleviate the usual sources of stress during work.

Reduce front desk turnover

A 2017 poll asked healthcare clinic managers which positions in the clinic have the highest turnover rate. Of the 1,133 responses, 32% reported front office staff as having the highest turnover.

Receptionists play an integral role in maintaining patient experience and intake. It can be very detrimental to lose receptionists, as you have to spend a lot of time and money to search, hire, and train new receptionists.

Having virtual medical receptionists is more than an alternative work arrangement for your front desk. It’s a practical enhancement of your healthcare operations’ front desk management. If you’re planning to have virtual medical receptionists, you need a virtual front desk solution like WelcomeWare to enable it.