5 Reasons Why Quality Office Staff Benefit Your Practice

The practice of medicine moves pretty fast, leaving little time for doctors to involve themselves with insurance, paperwork and office business processes. Of course, quality doctors and nurses are critical to excellent patient care. But without the right office staff, your practice could quickly be sent into a tailspin.

From the front desk staff to the billing department to the practice manager, it is important that you have quality staff who are efficient at their jobs and know how to work well with the doctors, nurses and each other. Here are a few ways that quality office staff will help your practice run like a well-oiled machine:

1. Providing positive patient contact. The right staff will provide customer service with a smile and help your practice maintain its stellar reputation. A front-desk person who greets patients politely, a scheduler who answers the phone promptly or a triage nurse who provides valuable advice will leave patients with an excellent first impression of your practice.

Having an organized, efficient front office will help your practice look polished and professional. Plus, great customer service and responsiveness will make your current patients more likely to send referrals your way.

2. Reducing insurance hassles. Your billing department is comprised of more than just number-crunchers. Collecting money from insurance companies is a tough job. That’s why it is critical that you have qualified coders and insurance liaisons who are persistent and committed to getting your bills paid.

Because they will spend a good portion of time on the phone trying to get payments from the insurance company, it is critical that billing staff have great phone skills. Billing staff should also be detail-oriented, as insurance forms and codes can be complicated—and one mistake can lead to a rejected claim.

3. Handling human resources. Hiring, firing, determining staffing levels and negotiating salary, vacation and benefit packages can be messy business. You need skilled individuals to handle personnel issues for you. In addition to handling minor human resources problems, a qualified HR manager will also have a good sense of what issues they need to bring to your attention.

A HR manager who has experience in the health care field will have an understanding of what qualities they need to look for when hiring staff for your practice. And having this knowledge will save you many headaches by when the HR manager creates accurate job descriptions and avoids making bad hires.

4. Building your practice. Practice managers help to bring cohesion to your team by offering positive reinforcement—and, when necessary, working with HR to issue correction for poor performance. A practice manager will also conduct public relations activities to help attract new patients and promote your services.

A quality practice manager will exercise oversight over all office functions in your practice and will be instrumental in helping you to identify your practice’s needs for automation, additional staff or new business processes.

5. Streamlining operations. Good office staff are invested in making your practice run as smoothly as possible. Therefore, they will identify problems with business processes and workflows and bring them to the attention of their supervisors or the practice manager. And, not only will they identify problems, but they will recommend solutions.

Experienced office staff may be able to make suggestions based on how offices were run at previous jobs. Or, they may have received training on other software platforms that allows them to make an informed product recommendation. They will also be willing to “test” new approaches to their work and offer constructive feedback.

Hiring high-quality office staff is sure to be a boon to your business. After all, you don’t want to entrust your practice’s reputation—or its finances—to just anyone!