As a doctor and practice owner, your primary focus should be on generating revenue through medical activities. Time spent on administrative tasks is time taken away from seeing patients, which can impact profitability. This underscores the importance of a capable medical secretarial team.
Whether you’re starting or scaling your practice, ensuring your staff is equipped to handle their responsibilities is crucial.
Indicators Your Admin Team Needs Support
Here are some signs that your medical secretaries and receptionists might be struggling, potentially affecting your bottom line:
- Overworked and overwhelmed staff
- Capability gaps within the team
- Unsatisfied patients due to poor customer service
- A fluctuating patient base that is either declining or growing unmanageably
- Lack of a clear management structure
- Stagnant or declining revenue
- Distracted doctors unable to focus on their work
Let’s improve your practice’s resilience and consider these three strategies to set up your medical secretarial team for success.
1. Outsource Time-Consuming Tasks
Outsourcing administrative tasks can benefit practices of all sizes. It allows your secretarial team to concentrate on crucial responsibilities while leveraging the expertise of outsourced professionals to enhance processes. HEre are some examples we have seen our Doctors Only clients implement and they have worked!
Handling High Volumes of Communication: If your practice is inundated with daily calls, emails, and queries, your secretarial team might struggle to keep up, leading to patient dissatisfaction and business inefficiency. Outsourcing tasks such as answering calls and booking appointments to qualified virtual receptionists can help your front desk team deliver exceptional in-person customer service.
Managing Financial Tasks: Bookkeeping and payroll are essential but can be complex due to evolving healthcare legislation around taxation, billing, record-keeping, and compliance. Outsourcing these tasks to expert medical bookkeepers can mitigate financial and legal risks.
2. Invest in Technology to Automate Processes
Investing in the right technology can automate time-consuming tasks and ensure accuracy and compliance, making your secretaries’ jobs easier.
Consider the following technological investments:
Practice Management Software: This is essential for managing the administration and operations of your practice. Manual processes are cumbersome, error-prone, and risky. Choose practice management software that is future-proof, scalable, and capable of integrating with other applications like booking systems, transcription software, and accounting platforms.
Medical Billing Technology: Managing in-patient billing is crucial for ensuring payments from patients, insurers, and other parties. Disorganised, manual billing processes can lead to unreconciled bills and lost revenue. Leveraging medical billing technology can streamline this process and reclaim lost revenue.
3. Employ Practice Management Support
As your practice grows, you may need additional resources to manage administration effectively. Hiring a practice manager can help maintain service delivery, especially if your practice serves multiple doctors.
A practice manager’s responsibilities are multifaceted, encompassing finance, HR, governance, IT, and facilities. They must be proficient in strategy, staff management, financial planning, and business reporting. Given the complexity of this role, it may be beneficial to support your practice manager with a practice management consultant.
A practice management consultant can identify and address capability gaps or assume the role of the practice manager if necessary. For instance, if your practice manager excels in financial management but lacks strategic insight, a consultant can fill that gap.
By providing your secretarial team with the tools and infrastructure they need, you can improve the efficiency and resilience of your practice.
Not sure where to start?
Make an appointment with our Lending Excellence Team for LA: Doctors Only NOW
Disclaimer: Any information provided herein is of a general nature only. No consideration has been taken into your objectives, needs or financial situation. Before acting on this information you should consider if it is appropriate for your situation.