For years, medical practices relied on a fairly traditional approach to staffing: hire full-time, benefitted employees to fill every necessary role and rely on decent retention rates. It worked well enough for decades. But something has changed over the course of the last few years to make a traditional approach to staffing more difficult to sustain and with the inability to control many factors, practices are exploring options they wouldn’t have even considered five years ago.
Since these challenges are unlikely to diminish anytime soon, the practices making changes are those most likely to thrive going forward. They aren’t moving away from traditional employment entirely; they’re just getting a bit more creative when it comes to their workforce.
The Recruitment Costs That Continue to Increase
Finding qualified medical office personnel has become costly in more ways than salary alone. The average cost of hiring a medical receptionist or administrative assistant now encompasses job posting sites, recruitment agencies if applicable, time for an office manager to review applicants and schedule interviews and lost productivity from having the position vacant. While charges vary across the country, for many practices, this comes to upwards of $3,000 to $5,000 per person hired before they’ve even set foot in the door.
Furthermore, it’s important to acknowledge that not every hire is a successful one. Just because someone looks good on paper and interviews well doesn’t mean they’re capable of handling the pace and demands of a medical office position. When this occurs, efforts have to start all over again, doubling one investment into a single role. Therefore, practices thriving amid these circumstances are those minimizing their need for constant hiring cycles.
Why Retention Has Become Such a Challenge
Even when practices hire good people, keeping them has become more difficult than years prior. From burnout and frustration due to pressures of office life to better-paying and more appealing remote roles in other industries, medical office staff are leaving for various reasons. With the pandemic changing how people view work/life balance, sitting at a medical office’s front desk five days a week isn’t compatible with what many people now want from life.
This perpetuates the frustrating cycle where practices must continuously train new employees, pulling veteran team members from their regular duties to onboard replacements. During these transitions, patient services suffer because no one knows how systems work as well as the person who just left. It’s not about inconvenience; it’s about maintaining quality of experience for patients who have no idea why the person they’ve dealt with for months is now suddenly gone.
The Benefit Package Expectations that Changed Everything
Healthcare benefits, paid time off, retirement contributions, these were once selling points that helped attract quality applicants to openings. Now it’s the bare minimum. Anyone looking for a full-time medical office position expects a full complement of benefits, and rightfully so, because salaries are just one part of the equation. These costs add significant expenditure above salaries that give small practices with tight margins additional arguments against increasing headcount when demand surely calls for it.
However, some practices have discovered that younger workers especially prefer flexibility over traditional benefits. For example, they’d prefer higher hourly pay with variable hours instead of weekly set hours with benefits. Such open-mindedness has paved new avenues and conversations for how best to staff support roles.
The New Solutions That Are Actually Effective
At this point, practices have begun to find alternatives that improve operations genuinely rather than serving merely as a band-aid solution. For example, combining traditional on-site employees with remote support for specific tasks has started to gain traction. Those roles that are truly patient-facing and require physical presence can be on-site, while those administrative duties that can be completed from anywhere can be provided by specialists elsewhere.
Medical virtual assistant service providers offer this level of coverage for practices looking for dedicated support without the burdens of another employee in-house. It works for practices because they get specialists without offering up space and equipment or traditional benefit packages and can scale coverage based on need, and scale back, without being tied into headcount.
The Flexibility That Modern Practices Demand
One of the critical benefits of these new staffing solutions is flexibility for various seasons or circumstances. Medical practices don’t possess consistent levels of work throughout the year. From back-to-school physical rushes to flu season and from open enrollment periods to PTO requests and holidays, there’s never a stable environment in which steady staffing makes sense.
Remote support allows practices to bring in extra support for these busy times and scale back when things settle down, something that wasn’t easily achieved before when temping services through agencies were expensive and rarely had workers qualified to manage medical office operations satisfactorily.
What This Means for Practice Operations
It’s not that the practices taking advantage of these changes are radically doing anything different; they’re simply being more strategic about which roles need traditional 40-hour-a-week, in-person employees and which roles can benefit from alternate support. For example, a practice may keep its office manager, lead medical assistant and one dedicated receptionist as traditional employees while supplementing phone coverage with remote operational support for insurance verifications and appointment reminders.
This also tends to positively impact job satisfaction for those on-site employees who aren’t overwhelmed all the time or constantly interrupted; when someone is assigned as a check-in specialist, they can focus on that job alone instead of simultaneously trying to answer phones from walk-ins while scheduling patients in person.
Staffing challenges are no stranger to medical practices nowadays, but they’re not going away any time soon. The good news is there are now viable alternatives to traditional solutions that work effectively for many practices and even better than before.
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