Medical practices are stuck in a squeeze. Patient loads increase, paperwork burdens increase, work becomes heavier each year. But the funding to hire more bodies does not increase at the same rate. In fact, for some practices, it barely matches expenditures already established.
This is a detrimental gap. Work needs to get done. Appointments need to be scheduled. Questions need to be answered. Insurance needs to be verified. Billing needs to be submitted. But hiring another full-time employee means $40,000 to $60,000 plus benefits, payroll taxes, physical space, equipment, and training time. For practices working on thin margins, this is a hefty investment without guaranteed reimbursement when all that is needed is extra hands on deck but too few funds exist to secure such help.
Practices therefore become trapped. They need extra hands but they cannot afford the traditional solution: bringing more staff on board. Thus, many practices have been turning to new, alternative ways of managing workloads for years.
Why The Math Doesn’t Add Up Anymore
Healthcare reimbursement from insurers has not increased to match practice expenditures. Medicare rates increase annually, if that, but only by pennies. Private insurance manages negotiated rates that feel arbitrarily set from year to year. Meanwhile, everything else increases. Rent increases. Salaries must remain at competitive levels or staff will leave for greener pastures. Medical supplies cost more. Subscriptions for relevant technology increase. Utilities, insurance premiums, equipment repairs, all on the rise.
For a practice seeing 20% more patients than five years ago, it’s also seeing a 10% increase in revenue at most with adjusted reimbursement policies and increased costs included. This is the gap where the squeeze occurs, the workload increases but the revenue potential does not match the increase.
Thus, the logical response is to hire more staff to take on the increased patient load. However, when margins are tight, adding an expense for payroll without a guaranteed revenue boost is a gamble that leaves many practice managers hesitant to make the leap. Instead, practice managers have done the math and determined that hiring another full-time employee will cost more than the revenue generated in months or years to come, in the short run.
Where Work Backs Up
However, a lack of staffing does not reduce the influx of work. Instead, it merely creates delays and inadequacies.
Voicemails go unanswered more often and patients need to wait longer to receive callbacks. Appointment scheduling gets bogged down meaning patients are experiencing longer wait times just for simple bookings. Insurance doesn’t get verified until the appointment is upon them, finding out they’ve let their coverage lapse or that their insurance changed and are seeking services out of network. Billing falls behind which means that claims aren’t submitted for weeks which devastates cash flow.
Current staff find themselves overwhelmed trying to do too much in too little time with too little support. They rush through tasks to try and keep up which generates mistakes. They stay late hoping to catch up on work which burns them out. Eventually someone quits through pressure and now there’s one less person doing the same workload again.
This scenario is plaguing practices across America, especially small or independent practices that don’t have the funding of hospital networks behind them.
The Hidden Costs Associated with Traditionally Hiring Staff
When practices do choose to hire someone, it costs more than just a salary amount.
There’s the hiring process to consider. Job postings cost. Reviewing resumes takes time. Interviewing applicants takes other staff away from their day-to-day duties. Background checks and reference reviews cost time and money. The entire process spans weeks or months while work continues to be backlogged.
There’s training and onboarding considerations as well. A new hire requires a desk, computer, landline, software passwords, and an introduction to how practice management works, including compliance with HIPAA regulations, intra-office communications and procedures exclusive to that office like how they file or not.
The reality is that it takes three to six months for someone to become fully productive after being hired which means for those first few months they receive full salary and benefits for partial productivity, a return on investment many practices working on thin margins just cannot afford.
Furthermore, there’s always the risk that a new hire will not work out. They won’t fit in well with the culture, they will struggle with responsibilities, they’ll leave after a few months for something better. Then the practice is back at square one with thousands upon thousands spent on hiring without anything in return.
Space Becomes A Real Issue
Many other practices have space issues as well; their offices were set up for a certain number of individuals and now construction or a physical move would be required just to add more bodies into the space, and both come with expensive price tags.
Construction means changing layout configurations, broken walls for periods of time with inconvenienced customers who may lose patience if surgeries or sensitive work is underway during busy hours at the practice. A larger move means paying higher rents and moving costs under the expense of new furniture after alerting every patient of an address change.
Some practices have legitimately run out of room for people even when they would want to pay their salaries, a full waiting room with no desks available in front or back offices mean cramped living quarters which aren’t necessarily good working conditions for anyone.
Alternative Solutions That Actually Work
This is where practices get creative and think outside the box for any services needed beyond hiring another full-time in-office employee.
For example, not every position requires someone to be present in an office; medical billing can be done from elsewhere, insurance verifications can happen from other states, even appointment scheduling can occur from off-site. Some patient communications can happen through virtual assistants who are not physically situated behind a desk at that particular practice.
My Mountain Mover medical virtual assistants offer trained administrative aides who work virtually, from answering medical questions that don’t require immediate physical support to complicated billing questions that require more than a cursory glance, virtual assistants offer relief beyond adding bodies to already full offices.
This solution solves multiple problems at once, work gets done without overwhelming anxious staff who are already too busy working harder rather than smarter for themselves; space issues are resolved without compromise; staffing levels can grow and shrink based on average caseloads relative to what makes financial sense rather than what has always been done through traditional hiring processes.
More importantly, it’s people doing this work, not machines or automated systems, people who know medical terminology with appropriate backgrounds who provide practices with quality assurance relative to quality experience but at reduced costs without compromising patient satisfaction.
What It Means for Practice Operations
Switching gears into a system with virtual support takes some adjusting; communication must be clear; technology must support offsite access to practice management systems; security must ensure relative caution for offsite work as well.
But these adjustments are generally less expensive and less disruptive than loading in extra bodies who might not even fit comfortably in the space or whose presence in one area may create challenges in another area. From a completely logical viewpoint, when the realities of 21st century operations don’t match how things have always been done in the past over subsequent decades, it’s not fair to shut down new ideas based on outdated beliefs alone.
The bottom line is this: as medical practices find themselves increasingly squeezed for resources if they are going to survive and sustain growing workloads without proportional increases in fixed costs they need to find reliable avenues through which administrative work gets done right without added complications.
This does not mean avoiding doing quality work for patient satisfaction levels but finding ways through which administrative sides of things conduct themselves smoothly while providing quality patient care regardless.
Medical practices aren’t failing when they’re tight on help but believe they can’t financially support retaining others; they’re up against real challenges resulting from healthcare economics about how they’ve worked in existence thus far across decades that become less relevant when compared to 21st century realities.
Medical practices successfully navigating between tight finances and inadequate help are those willing to look outside traditional approaches and understand that there’s help out there that matches what would make sense for a practice without implementing financial changes through volume hire policies.
Thus, the flexibility and thoughtful exploration of new staffing approaches make sense less as something innovative but more as reasonable stability going forward so operations can remain viable as independent practices for generations to come.
