Front desk staff in most practices do three jobs at once: greeting patients, answering phones and keeping billing moving. When the waiting room is full, the phones and the follow ups wait. A remote team can take on much of the admin load, as long as you are clear about what moves and what stays.
Work a remote team can take on
- Scheduling and reminders: booking, rescheduling and reminder calls or messages, using your scheduling rules.
- Insurance verification: checking eligibility and benefits before appointments, in your payer portals.
- Billing follow ups: working the open claims list, following up with payers and posting payments.
- Recall and outreach: contacting patients who are due for a visit.
- Practice marketing support: keeping listings and social posts up to date.
What stays in house
- Everything in the room with a patient, from check in to clinical care
- Clinical decisions and coding decisions, which stay with your clinicians and your billing manager
- Anything your policies or your agreements say must be handled by your own staff
Your clinicians and billing manager review the work and make every clinical and coding decision. The remote team prepares, follows up and keeps the queues moving.
Access and data
The team works only inside your systems, such as your practice management system, payer portals and phone system, with access you grant and control. You can end that access at any time. Before any work starts, agree in writing which systems and which kinds of information the team will work with. Every employmagic specialist completes our Privacy and Data Protection training and passes a quiz before getting access to any client system.
A four week start
- Week 1: map. List the admin tasks your front desk and billing staff do each day, and how long each one takes.
- Week 2: set up. Grant access, share your scripts and scheduling rules, and agree the escalation rules, such as an upset patient or a clinical question goes straight to your staff.
- Week 3: supervised work. The team works the phones and the claims list while your practice manager reviews their work each day.
- Week 4: hand over. The team runs the queues on its own, and your staff handle only the escalations.
What to measure
- Calls answered and missed during practice hours
- No shows, before and after reminder calls start
- Claims older than 30 days
- Hours your front desk spends on phones each day
For an illustrative example with figures, see how a family medicine practice could work through its billing backlog.