Overhead is going up and payment for the most part is going down.  Even what it used to be one of the lowest paid employees in a medical office is becoming quite expensive. Medical Assistants for example are now been paid an average of $14.71 before taxes and benefits.  While benefits and taxes vary it typically ends up being 18% to 26% more than a worker’s base salary. For some companies I have seen these costs to rise up to 40% of the base salary.  Of course if you consider holidays, sick days and vacations you can easily add another 8% to the basic overhead of 18% so in reality at the very least your costs will range from 26% to 34% in most offices.   Medical Assistants                                                                Receptionists/Information Clerks

%	$/hr	OH @ 18%	Total		%	$/hr	OH @ 18%	Total
10%	$    10.60	$       2.76	$    13.36		10%	$       9.17	$       2.38	$    11.55
25%	$    12.54	$       3.26	$    15.80		25%	$    10.64	$       2.77	$    13.41
50%	$    14.71	$       3.82	$    18.53		50%	$    13.12	$       3.41	$    16.53
75%	$    17.69	$       4.60	$    22.29		75%	$    17.69	$       4.60	$    22.29
90%	$    21.10	$       5.49	$    26.59		90%	$    18.92	$       4.92	$    23.84

However the increase in overhead has also brought opportunities to the medical professional in the form of technology and applications which allow us to run a healthcare business remotely.  If you think about it most healthcare professionals use electronic medical records that may be accessed securely thru the Internet.  The same is true of telecommunications whether you realize or not as most companies provide the basic telephone services thru the Internet.  The end result has been a remotely run operation even if you are standing next door. In our case we have taken advantage of this opportunity to create a call center/virtual assistant portal where I can hire a bilingual Medical Doctor to do some tasks for the price of a Medical Assistant or Receptionist.  In other words, I have a registered nurse and a Medical Doctor answering phones, explaining procedures to patients, reviewing our notes, following on labs and making sure everything we don’t miss anything. Let’s break it down even further.  A Primary Care Provider in Florida gets paid $72.74 for a follow-up medium complexity office visit (99213).  Based on the increase amount of documentation required per visit some Providers struggle with seen 3 patients per hour so we will use this number as a basis.

3 patients times $72.74 = $ 218.22 per hour

 Considering the use of a virtual assistant with a medical degree the average number of patients per hour can easily go from 3 patients per hour to 5 patients per hour.  Therefore the numbers in this case may look like:

 5 patients times $72.74 = $ 363.7 per hour

I’m not saying that we need to get rid of our receptionists and medical assistants; instead I’m looking at an opportunity to increase our production, reduce our liability and increase our bottom line with the right tools in place. In our case, we have decided for over two years now, to use our virtual assistants rather than adding medical assistants or receptionists.

The whole process has been so effective that we are now adding more resources and are starting to offer these services to other healthcare professionals and organizations.  So instead of complaining about rising overhead look at other possibilities as we have already done.