Using Tech to Boost Patient Care and Streamline Operations [PODCAST]

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Highlights of this episode include:

• What is a medical virtual assistant?
• Where do hospitals typically see the most meaningful cost savings or efficiency gains when using the medical VAs?
• How GMVA ensures medical virtual assistance remain fully HIPAA-compliant and safeguard patient information while working remotely
• How the virtual assistant model scale for larger hospital systems or multi-facility organizations compared to smaller practices
• Where’s the best place to start to ensure long-term ROI?
• What other hospital departments are a good fit for medical virtual assistance?

Kelly Wisness: Hi, this is Kelly Wisness. Welcome back to the award-winning Hospital Finance Podcast. We’re pleased to welcome Beth Raboin. Beth is leading GMVA in vision in the day-to-day business operations securing the functionality of the business to drive extensive and sustainable growth. Combining her strong leadership and determination with over 22 years of corporate experience in the private and public sector of surgical device, pharmaceutical, and specialty pharmacy industries, she keeps the company moving forward with high-level strategy while understanding the details of day-to-day execution to ensure steadfast success.

Prior to Beth’s corporate and entrepreneur experience, she competed as a full athletic scholarship athlete as a Division 1 gymnast at the University of Florida, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Health Sciences.

In this episode, we’re discussing using tech to boost patient care and streamline operations. Welcome, and thank you for joining us, Beth.

Beth Raboin: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Kelly. I’m so excited to be here.

Kelly: We’re excited to have you. So, let’s go ahead and jump in. So, for listeners who may be newer to the concept, what exactly is a medical virtual assistant? And how do they differ from traditional outsourcing models?

Beth: Yeah, oh thank you so much. Starting with a big question there, Kelly. So, first of all, medical virtual assistants are additional staff that you can bring into your hospital or medical practice to help facilitate some of the back office work that needs to happen. So, we do not do clinical care. Medical virtual assistants do all of the clerical and/or administrative patient care that happens behind the scenes. So that’s the differentiator between your typical in-hospital setting versus bringing in a medical virtual assistant. And how we’re different from other models is you’re not outsourcing. You’re not sending and outsourcing all of the work elsewhere. That’s not how it works. We are actually more like an insource. We’re additional staffing that’s brought into your medical practice and/or hospital to do the work that needs to get done within your tools, within your systems, within your workflows. And so, we’re actually integrated as part of the team.

Kelly: I love that. It’s so intriguing. From a financial standpoint, where do hospitals typically see the most meaningful cost savings or efficiency gains when using the medical VAs?

Beth: Oh, gosh. Well, so we’re a fraction of the cost of what it would be to hire someone here in– within the hospital system within the United States. We are outside of the United States, so we’re mainly in the Philippines where the cost of living is lower. So therefore, the cost structure for our business model is also lower. And where they can utilize our services is just, it’s endless. Where we’re seeing where we’re a huge asset– for example, we just were onboarded this past year with a huge healthcare hospital system on the West Coast. They brought us just in to do patient access to fill in some open appointments, making sure patients are going to show up to their appointments, and then backfilling the appointments within the schedule that those patients were not going to show up to. And they saw an immediate, an immediate, I think it was like $2 or $3 million difference in their bottom line just within two quarters. So that’s just one simple example. We’ve also been brought in heavily within the hospital systems, within revenue cycle management. Collecting dollars is critical for hospital systems, making sure that denied claims are in fact paid. And so the resubmittal of claims, following up on denied claims, making sure that patient balances are paid, all of that. So that also is a really big– a really great place to be able to bring in our staff to help and augment the way things are being done within that hospital.

Kelly: Wow, I mean, so some significant savings there. That’s awesome. So how does GMVA ensure medical virtual assistance remain fully HIPAA-compliant and safeguard patient information while working remotely?

Beth: Yeah, well, so there’s a few different ways we do that. Number one, we’re hiring professionals, right? We’re hiring people who have a bachelor’s degree, a bachelor’s degree, typically in nursing. They understand healthcare. They understand HIPAA and PHI. And so, they’re put through obviously a HIPAA certification class, so they’re HIPAA-certified, but that’s not enough. That’s just not enough to ensure patient information is– it’s just not enough to make sure patient information is protected, right? So, we put in additional safeguards and everyone works remotely, they’re not working within a call center, they’re working from their home. So, we’ve put additional software security on their computer systems to make sure that they’ve got a closed network that they’re working within. So, they’re logging directly into the client’s EMRs, directly into the client’s tools, and we need to make sure that there’s no nefarious actors or viruses are able to penetrate the system. So, we’ve got a pretty substantial, what we call a blue box on their computer, and they’re working within the safeguards of that system. It’s amazing. It’s been one of the things that we heavily invested in just to ensure that we’re protecting patient information. But beyond that, we’re also protecting the tools of our clients because we all know that viruses and/or nefarious actors are working consistently to try to break into hospital systems, break into hospitality, break into banks, and any possible way that they can try to penetrate a closed off system. So, we do everything within our power to make sure that we’re keeping patient information protected.

Kelly: Yeah, I know HIPAA compliance is so important. And for lack of a better term, it’s an epidemic that we’re just kind of hitting. We’re being hit with all these bad actors all the time. So, it’s just a constant issue, isn’t it?

Beth: Oh, constantly. So, I mean, we’re all getting them even into our private email addresses, work email addresses, people sending over what you think looks like a real invoice, but it’s not a real invoice. You click on it, before you know, you’re in trouble. So yeah, we’re trying to do the absolute best we can to keep up to date on protecting any and all software that we’re logging into.

Kelly: Definitely, yeah. So how does the virtual assistant model scale for larger hospital systems or multi-facility organizations compared to smaller practices?

Beth: Yeah, I mean, the scaling is one of the things that we’ve really become a specialist in. What we do is the onboarding of our services can be– that’s where you have more skin in the game, and there’s a good six to eight weeks of training us on your tools, your systems, your strategies, your service level agreements that we work out with you. That’s where really that’s some of the hurdles you need to get over in the beginning. Once we do that, we have all the training materials necessary to then scale with you, so your team is no longer having to do the training, right? So, scaling has really been one of the wonderful things that we can do really quickly and efficiently. And hospital systems for sure– like I said, I had mentioned one particular hospital system. We had another hospital system we also started with last year that just wanted to start with 10 medical virtual assistants. And within a month’s time, they were like, “Wow, this is really working out amazing.” And they’ve already scaled up over 75. And so we’re able to be able to do that for them and really kind of keep up with the pace of what’s necessary and intending to bring in really great talent to be able to do and meet the service level agreements that we’ve come up with along with our client to make sure that we’re bringing nothing but the best in terms of patient service. So yeah, it’s been an interesting, fun business model. I love the scaling piece of it. It’s one of the things that we’ve I’m really great at. And it is different for a large practice or a large medical system versus a smaller practice. Smaller practices, they just don’t see the huge patient volume that a large system would see. And so, but we can still manage and handhold them through bringing on one, two, three virtual assistants. But in a hospital system, we can bring in 25, 50, 75, 150 virtual assistants and scale and keep them and manage them.

Kelly: Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome. I mean, I love what you said about scaling with you. That seems like something that you got that is very valuable. So, for a CFO or revenue cycle leader considering medical virtual assistance for the first time, where’s the best place to start to ensure long-term ROI?

Beth: Yeah. I mean, of course, one of the first places you would want to start– any one of us would want to start is where we can make an immediate impact to the bottom line, so whether that’s patient balances, whether that’s following up on denied claims, whether it’s submittal of claims. As we become more and more infiltrated into some of the hospital systems, we’re learning that there’s large amounts of balances that are still not on the balance sheet, that just have not been paid to the bottom line yet. That’s where we can make an immediate impact. How we are different than other outsourced companies is we don’t take a fee for that. That’s not how we function. We don’t get a percentage of what is collected. That’s just not what we do. We are additional staffing. We are butts in seats to do the actual work. And so that also is a really great benefit to the hospital or medical system because then they’re not losing part of that revenue to an outside source. And so that also is an additional part of the way we function in terms of bringing an additional asset to the team without getting a part of what those payouts would look like or a percentage of those fees.

Kelly: That sounds pretty awesome. Beyond those revenue cycle teams, what other hospital departments are a good fit for medical virtual assistance?

Beth: Most definitely anything within specialties. Specialties are really where we shine. We have extensive training internally for particular specialties. So, our medical virtual assistants are very well versed in the types of procedures that they’re going through, whether it’s in neurology or it’s the cardiac unit or it’s in the fertility space. We become quite versed in being able to have those conversations with patients or internally with the existing staff, knowing the medical terminology is there. We understand the patient journey. We understand the procedures that are taking place. We understand the medications that the patients are being given. So, when it comes to be doing prior authorizations for patient medication or prior authorizations for getting diagnostic care or getting the procedures done, we can do all of that. So, we really fit really nicely in every piece of the model within revenue cycle management, if you include prior auths and insurance verification as part of that journey. We can do all of that. But patient facing, patient access is also something we’re really, really fantastic, and we have a great fit within models of the patient access.

Kelly: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much, Beth, for sharing your insights with us on using tech to boost patient care and streamline operations. If a listener wants to learn more or contact you to discuss this topic further, how best can they do that?

Beth: Yeah, we’d love you. Just go right to our website. You can find so much information. So, it’s https://gmva.com/, and that’s Global Medical Virtual Assistants dot com. And we’ve got voice recordings there of what our virtual assistants sound like. We have podcasts like yours, Kelly, will be on there kind of listening to hear what we’ve done or what we do, as well as a whole host of other resources, and also a way to be able to quickly schedule a strategy session to have a meeting with us and have a Zoom call with us to get a better understanding of how we can fit into your model.

Kelly: Great. Well, thank you for providing that for us, Beth. And thank you all for joining us for this episode of The Hospital Finance Podcast. Until next time…

[music] This concludes today’s episode of The Hospital Finance Podcast. For show notes and additional resources to help you protect and enhance revenue at your hospital, visit besler.holdings/podcasts. The Hospital Finance Podcast is a production of Besler Holdings.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to discuss on The Hospital Finance Podcast or if you’d like to be a guest, drop us a line at update@besler.com.

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