Does Your Private Practice Really Need On-Site Office Staff?

If you own your own private medical or dental practice, you may think that you need regular staff. Staff in your office might be helpful, but not always necessary unless your practice is flourishing and really busy. Not only can remote employees be more helpful, but remote employees can be more productive. Here is how you can do this.

Office-Trained Doctors

Doctors who know how to run their own offices, can do it. You can save a lot of money doing most office tasks yourself. Of course, if you are with a patient, you cannot answer phones or set appointments. If you do decide to run your own office, you need to make sure that you have the resources available to run your business efficiently. Make sure you are well-versed in business practices and have the proper software and other technology that you need to be able to run your practice on your own. It’s important to know and be able to know proper business practices so you can be compliant with various business laws.

Off-Site Options

Outsourcing office tasks is fairly common in the medical industry. In fact, some smaller hospitals even have payroll and accounting services that work at home rather than work in the hospital and take up extra space that could be used for patients. Billing and coding specialists for hospitals have been working off-site for a couple of decades now.

It’s also been argued that remote employees can be more productive than those who work on site. When they do not have the constant interruptions and distractions that are common with being in the office with other employees and patients stopping to ask questions, the remote or at-home employees can complete more tasks. That is really helpful to you because they are somewhere else doing their jobs while you just keep seeing patients as usual.

The Bare Minimum of Off-Site Employees You Need

If you are not going to manage your own office tasks and work, and you want others to do it, you will need a bare minimum of three employees. One accountant to handle all the money and payroll affairs is needed, and one medical billing and coding specialist to manage all of the special insurance billing processes. You will also need one person to which you can route calls, answer phones, and schedule appointments (i.e., a medical administrative assistant). Lucky for you, all of these professionals can and do work at remote/at-home offices.

You will find that when your three office staff working elsewhere are doing tasks for you, they finish those tasks very quickly. As such, you may not need to pay them full-time wages. The accountant, in particular, may only work a couple of days each week for you. The administrative assistant may require full-time hours to keep your schedule full. It just depends on how busy your private practice becomes.

For more help running your private practice, take advantage of our consulting services!