Physicians work hard enough providing medical support and delivering healthcare services, sometimes extending beyond their normal work shift. Give that, it’s all the more important to spare them from additional responsibilities of replying to patients’ or other emails, managing appointments, answering calls, and handling various administrative tasks. This is where our Virtual Assistant service brings relief as it lets physicians take a breather amidst their hectic and chaotic schedules.
A Virtual Assistance is a highly-skilled, qualified, and well-trained person who helps a healthcare provider with administrative, clerical, and customer support tasks. This support includes scheduling appointments, engaging with patients to help manage their referrals, facilitating pre-approvals and prior authorizations, etc.
Virtual Assistance is NOT an AI-driven tool for performing automated tasks with voice commands. It is a service involving empathetic people dedicated to enhancing physician productivity and quality of care.
As the paradigm shift continues to occur across the healthcare industry with more digital solutions managing various aspects of processes and data, healthcare providers and facilities are beginning to deploy the use of Virtual Medical Assistants to shoulder the burdensome administrative and non-clinical tasks.
In this article, we look at the enormous benefits of hiring Virtual Assistants that you might be missing out on.
Documenting the Clinical Visit
A Virtual Assistant (scribe) connects to the assigned healthcare provider before the shift starts. As the patient comes in for an appointment, the Virtual Assistant (scribe) listens to the patient-physician interaction and documents the narrative of the clinical encounters in the EMR in real-time. The professional would complete the chart within a couple of minutes after the visit is over, allowing the provider to see the patients in a relaxed state of mind. Virtual Assistant (scribe) prepares the medical note in a manner that the insurance provider can easily comprehend and approve the claim, resulting in faster reimbursement and improved Revenue Cycle Management (RCM).
Managing Referrals
A Virtual Assistant gathers instructions and results from notes of the consulting physician visit(s) and conveys them to the referred physician. Similarly, they coordinate with the specialist and responds to the messages sent to the primary care physician (PCP). Further, Virtual Assistants work closely with patients and the specialist to arrange and schedule referral, ensuring referral completion. They are proficient on working on powerful Referral Management tools, enabling them to keep track of their patient referrals throughout the care continuum.
Managing Appointments
Virtual Assistants create patient engagement letters, set reminders, and update status while registering new patients and adding them to the patient portal. They manage scheduling and rescheduling patient’s appointments and conveying the same to the doctor.
Handling Calls and Inbound Emails
Receiving a large number of daily calls and emails can be a daunting and time-consuming task. A Virtual Assistant serves as a bridge between healthcare providers, hospital offices, and patients orchestrating various clinical and administrative processes. Virtual Medical Assistants handle calls as well as reply to emails sent by patients and other hospitals, allowing you to focus on what you do the best – delivering healthcare.
Verifying Insurance Eligibility
If given the duty, Virtual Medical Assistants can also identify the patient’s responsibility before the clinical visit and verify Insurance Eligibility and coverage details. They obtain prior authorization and pre-approvals before any treatment is given and make follow-up calls to the patients to convey any issue or change in their insurance plan. Hence, they help the healthcare providers and facility determining the treatment service that can be given per the insurance coverage.
Avoiding Burnout
With Virtual Medical Assistants completing all the clerical and ancillary tasks, including finishing clinical notes and communicating to various faculties, they allow physicians to leave the facility on time and spend some quality time at home with their families.
Improving healthcare delivery and patient experience
Virtual Assistant (scribe) offers a significant improvement in the overall delivery of healthcare and the patient experience by adding and registering new patients to the portal, managing referrals, scheduling appointments, and much more. Outsourcing managing the important ancillary tasks to a Virtual Assistant reduces headcount, payroll, and the headache of managing employees in general.
Why ScribeEMR?
One-stop solution to all your clinical and extra-clinical requirements
ScribeEMR offers highly qualified and skilled professionals as Virtual Assistants to provide holistic support to healthcare providers and office staff. A comprehensive set of Discovery Calls are made to the healthcare facility, gauging the office’s requirements that our resource would need to fulfill. We gather succinct information on the workflow and the challenges faced by the clinic and its healthcare providers.
The management at ScribeEMR then implements a personalized strategy to deliver the support most effectively and proficiently as per the need. Expert Virtual Assistants of ScribeEMR are well-versed with clinical and administrative workflows. They understand the demands of physicians and responsibly carry out the tasks assigned to them.