Most practices are open to patients eight hours a day. But according to the American Medical Association (AMA), doctors often spend an average of 5.8 hours in the electronic health record (EHR) for every eight hours of scheduled patient care. That’s nearly six more hours after the practice closes for the day if the practice only sees eight patients for the day. As a solution, practices often add more providers to increase the organization’s capacity for patient care. But as the patient volume increases further, the administrative workload will become even heavier.
As critical as tasks like patient communication and documentation management are to multi-provider practice management, they require a significant amount of time and attention from your team. If your practice has insufficient manpower, your doctors and in-person staff can quickly become overwhelmed by them, compromising the very reason your practice is operating: providing quality care to people seeking medical attention.
However, the challenge isn’t simply hiring more people because if it were, practices with a comprehensive team structure wouldn’t be overwhelmed with administrative burden. Rather, it’s finding administrative support that allows your practice to grow without creating even more administrative overhead.
Why Does a Multi-Provider Clinic Need More Administrative Support?
Every healthcare practice has administrative responsibilities. However, those responsibilities become significantly more complex when multiple providers work within the same organization because instead of just considering the specifics of one doctor, your team now has to take into account varying appointment capacities, scheduling preferences, and target patient demographics when performing the tasks they were hired to do.
As patient volume continues to grow, collaborating with multiple providers becomes more challenging because administrative bottlenecks don’t always happen because your team lacks experience. More often than not, they happen because your practice has simply outgrown the amount of administrative support it currently has. And when patient calls or messages are left unanswered, patients don’t just wait for a response; they book with the next practice that picks up.
What Kind of Administrative Support Does a Multi-Provider Clinic Need?
The type of administrative support your practice needs will depend on your specialty, patient volume, and internal workflows. However, most growing healthcare organizations require help with many of the same day-to-day responsibilities.
These often include:
- Scheduling appointments and managing calendars
- Answering phone calls from patients and third-party providers, including after-hours and overflow coverage
- Verifying insurance coverage
- Organizing medical records
- Documenting patient visits and treatment updates
- Billing and coding
- Following up on payments
While each responsibility may seem manageable by itself, they become much more demanding when not only compounded but also multiplied across several providers and hundreds or even thousands of patients.
What Are Your Options for Administrative Support?
When it comes to expanding your existing administrative team, you usually have three options to choose from: hiring an additional full-time in-person employee, a temporary staff member, or a medical VA. All three can do the job, but for most growing multi-provider clinics, medical VAs tend to offer the best balance of cost, practicality, and flexibility. Here’s why:
Full-Time, In-Person Staff
Hiring an in-person administrative staff member on a full-time basis is often the default for practices looking to expand their team. Because they work inside your clinic, they can help you with responsibilities that require a physical presence, such as performing tests and initial screenings. Moreover, having an in-person hire makes oversight more straightforward. If you need something, you can go to their workspace and have them do what needs to be done, which can tremendously benefit practices with complex front-desk needs.
However, the cost of hiring them is more than just salary. Employment expenses like benefits and taxes easily add to the time and money you have already spent sourcing and hiring them. Additionally, you have to shoulder infrastructural costs like dedicated office space and equipment, both of which are commodities that you need to provide for an in-person hire.
You may be able to afford these expenses upfront, but they can quickly double if the role turns over and you need to hire a replacement employee.
To identify where you can make the most of your administrative budget, you should evaluate the overall cost, not just the salary line. If you need someone physically present every day, a full-time, in-person employee is the better option. Otherwise, other employment setups are worth your consideration.
Temporary Administrative Staff
Not all administrative challenges are persistent. Some practices experience demanding periods that are only seasonal or because of a temporary community situation. For either reason, they may not want to make a permanent hire right away.
Temporary administrative staff can help you fill these gaps without committing to another long-term employee. For example, you can bring someone in while an existing team member is on leave or during a particularly busy period and have them take on administrative responsibilities until the additional support is no longer necessary. However, the temporary nature of the arrangement can also be its biggest limitation.
Temporary employees still need time to learn how your practice works before they can work independently. Depending on how long you need them, you may end up spending more time guiding them than having them do what you hired them to do.
Because of these considerations, temporary hires are generally more practical if you know exactly when you’ll stop needing their support. If the workload is ongoing, you need a longer-term solution instead.
Medical Virtual Assistants
Much like full-time, in-person employees, medical virtual assistants (VAs) perform a wide range of administrative tasks, albeit remotely. Because of this, practices can get the support they need without having to pay for employee benefits, taxes, and infrastructural expenses. This also makes them easier to scale because you can expand your administrative team without needing additional office space for every new hire.
Medical VAs also offer flexibility. Since they don’t need to physically be in your practice, their working hours don’t necessarily need to match those of your in-person team. You can have them start before your practice opens, after it closes, or cover the same hours as your existing staff, depending on when you need the most administrative support.
While hiring freelancers from online job sites is often the cheapest way to find a medical VA, doing so means that most of the hiring work will fall on you. You’ll have to find and screen candidates, train them, and make sure they know how to securely handle protected health information (PHI). Alternatively, you can consider working with companies that provide medical virtual assistant services like My Mountain Mover.
More often than not, companies that provide VAs have a higher upfront cost. However, they make the whole process of working with a VA easier by:
- Taking on much of the recruitment efforts
- Pre-training on HIPAA, EHRs, patient communication, and, when necessary, your specific healthcare specialty
- Having a signed BAA and an in-house HIPAA officer
- Providing a dedicated account manager for ongoing support
Understandably, some providers are cautious about delegating administrative tasks to someone who works away from the clinic because of HIPAA. However, remote work itself does not compromise the security of PHI as long as the right cybersecurity measures and safeguards for healthcare administrative solutions are in place.
All in all, medical VAs are often the most practical long-term option for the administrative workload that drives most of a multi-provider clinic’s overhead.
What Your Ideal Admin Support Should Look Like
The right clinic administrative support doesn’t simply solve today’s staffing challenges. It should also help your practice continue operating efficiently as patient volume grows, more providers are added, and administrative responsibilities become more complex.
Whether you’re looking to hire someone who can be physically inside your clinic or to outsource medical admin tasks to a remote employee, your goal should be the same: finding a solution that supports both your immediate needs and your long-term growth.
Every practice is different, and in-person or temporary staff still have their place for hands-on or short-term needs. But for the ongoing administrative load most multi-provider clinics carry, a medical VA is typically the most cost-effective and scalable way to keep up as you grow.
By taking the time to evaluate your options carefully, you can build an administrative support system that not only keeps your practice running efficiently today but also gives you the flexibility to adapt as your organization continues to grow.
Build Your Administrative Team With My Mountain Mover
My Mountain Mover specializes in matching healthcare practices with HIPAA-compliant medical virtual assistants who can support growing administrative workloads. As an award-winning partner with an 81% VA retention rate, we help practices find trained remote professionals who can work alongside their existing teams.
Get the long-term administrative support you need without the added costs of expanding your in-person staff. Our medical VAs are trained to handle patient communication, scheduling, insurance verification, medical records, and other day-to-day responsibilities that keep your practice running. Contact us online or call (909) 769-0692 today to discuss your administrative needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my practice has enough administrative support?
If administrative tasks are consistently delaying patient care, increasing staff overtime, or creating scheduling backlogs, it may be time to evaluate your current staffing model.
How many administrative staff does a multi-provider clinic typically need?
There’s no universal number. The right staffing level depends on factors such as patient volume, specialty, appointment complexity, and how responsibilities are divided among your team.
How often should I review my administrative staffing needs?
It’s a good idea to review your staffing whenever your practice experiences significant growth, adds new providers or services, or notices recurring administrative bottlenecks.
