[LATOYA SMITH] The Grow A Group Practice Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice Network, a network of podcast seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like the Practice of the Practice podcast, go to www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. You are listening to the Grow A Group Practice Podcast, a podcast focused on helping people start, grow, and scale a group practice. Each week you’ll hear topics that are relevant to group practice owners. I’m LaToya Smith, a practice owner, and I love hearing about people’s stories and real-life experiences. So let’s get started. . Welcome back to the Grow A Group Practice Podcast. Woo, happy to have you here. I know as this podcast is airing, we are entering into the new year so I’m hopeful, happy that you had a good holiday season and hopefully your New Year’s off to a good start. You are looking over your practice, you’re thinking about the things you want to work on, the goals that you have for this year, and how to move forward in a healthy way, a structured way. What makes today even more awesome that’s fitting is that I’m going to be talking with Beth Lechance, and she has her own VA company, helps private practices get virtual assistants on board. There’s some, if there’s anything I hear often and a lot is when to hire virtual assistant? What can they do? How do you know you’re hiring the right assistant for you? Who can you call? Where can you go? So it’s fitting, it’s timely that Beth is joining us today. I told Beth when we started, listen, I lost my voice earlier in the week. I’m getting it back. I feel like the more I talk, it’s going to keep coming back. [LATOYA] Beth, welcome to the podcast. [BETH LACHANCE] Thank you, LaToya. I am so excited you had me on today. I am pumped and I’m even more excited that this is going to be launched at the very beginning of the new year and that’s the time where we all refocus on our practices and we all figure out, okay, what do we need to do to have a successful year? So I’m excited that I’m part of it the very beginning of the year. [LATOYA] Thank you, thank you. So Beth, tell our audience a little bit about you, who you are. [BETH] Thanks so much. I’m Beth Lechance. I am the founder and CEO of REVA Global Medical. We a company that specializes in bringing virtual professionals to medical practices and hospitals and hospital systems across the country. A little bit about me, I have three children that keep me insanely busy,, and yeah, I’m married. I have a busy social life. I try to keep very active and I have an extensive medical background in terms of working within medical practices in all different specialties. That’s what brought me to this industry to begin with. My husband started a virtual assistant company that specialized in bringing virtual professionals to real estate entrepreneurs and real estate companies and so when I joined forces with him four years ago, I immediately said, we need a medical division. This is where I can really take off with this. It was just a natural progression for me to go ahead and start with that. That’s how I entered into this field and wow, has it been a whirlwind? You know with Covid happening, it was one of those things that it’s always nerve-wracking for a business or medical practice when you have huge things, and huge changes and things that happen. The pandemic threw everything for a loop and threw everyone for a loop but I have to say, with this industry, I just happen to be in the right place at the right time. We have amazing staff and amazing people that can immediately be placed in practices. So my calls, my sales calls and my initial conversations with medical practices, practitioners, physicians that sales call is so different now than it used to be pre-pandemic. Pre-pandemic was, okay, why do I need a medical virtual assistant? What can they do? Now, it’s okay, how can we get this going and how do we implement this? It’s a very different call. It’s very different. It’s actually really fun,. It’s really fun because then I don’t have to go through the reasons why. It’s already, people already know why and why it’s necessary. So it’s been a really, it’s been an interesting time to be in this industry, but this is definitely the beginning and it’s only going to expand from here so I’m excited to be here. [LATOYA] No, it sounds great. I love what you’re saying, you’ve been in the medical field for a very long time and realizing like, this is an industry I need to step into. What I hear you saying is, hindsight, man, you be there at the right time, like very much needed. But let’s go back a little bit and something you just said. Let’s just say, because I get, I hear a lot from people, especially those just starting out who are ready to say, “Hey, I’m ready to launch into a group practice. I’ve been a solar practitioner, been by myself for a while, I need to take this next step.” Let’s say you are talking to an individual who owns their own practice. When I go in the group and they’re like, listen, I don’t even know, I’m just overwhelmed, I need help, but I don’t know what I need. I don’t know when the right time to hire a VA and I don’t know the right person. Let’s just start about, if that person does call up, what are the initial questions you’re asking? [BETH] Oh, yeah, great. Well, first, first of all, as soon as a practitioner or a practice owner says, I’m overwhelmed, it’s time. There’s no more waiting. It’s already, they should have hired somebody yesterday if they’re already, if they’re saying that. So it is time. No more delay, bite the bullet, it’s time to move forward and get that done. But some of the initial questions that I ask are, especially when you have someone who’s really overwhelmed, there’s so many things that need to get done in a medical practice for it to be successful. I mean, a lot of ducks need to be set up in a row in order to make sure that things are going the right way. Of course, first and foremost, patient care. I mean, that is the very first thing we look at. But if we drop the ball and on the other things that happen, then your practice isn’t getting paid. Then that’s a big problem. So my very first set of questions usually revolves around, okay, well what are the main pain points that you’re finding? Like, what is draining you? What is overwhelming? Then let’s come up with a task list around that. But typically it always starts with, okay, well what is that main, main thing that you think could immediately be handed off to someone else that wouldn’t take a tremendous amount of training, but would be enough, but something that you could immediately get off your plate? Let’s start with that, because if we don’t start in the right place, and we start with really, really big things sometimes, especially if you’re a solo practitioner onboarding anyone, whether it’s a medical virtual assistant or it’s somebody within your practice coming into your practice, it takes a lot of time and energy to train someone and get them up to par on what the expectations are, what the KPIs will be, what your practice really feels like, how you want the practice to feel in terms of your culture, how you do your patient care. All of that is part of your practice. So it takes time to do that. So if I have somebody who’s like, well, I need, and they list off 10 things, they’re like, “I need this, and this and this and this,” I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on. You’re going to be really overwhelmed to start.” So the medical professional, the virtual assistant, so let’s start with a handful of things that we know that we can immediately get off of your plate that would make an impact on your day. Then we’ll start seeing, okay, well, how much time is left in the virtual assistance day? We’ll do a time in motion and we’ll see how much time is left in their day to figure out, okay, what are some of the other things that we can take off your plate or help within the practice? That’s where we start just because you’re looking at a mountain, let’s bring it way down. Let’s just look at a hill. We don’t need a mountain, we need a hill to start. Then we get over one hurdle at a time. [LATOYA] Yeah, no, I love that. I love the fact that you say, I say that all the time because I learned the hard way, if you’re at a place where you are overwhelmed, you don’t know your right from your left, you don’t know, listen, it’s too late. You should have did it already. That’s even when bringing somebody on, I’ll always tell that story like, man, if you feel like, when you’re three quarters of the way full, it’s time to hire somebody or time to get somebody in there. So don’t wait to burn out. Don’t do like me, don’t wait to burn out and then panic and find some calls, but see it happening. [BETH] Correct. Also keep that in mind for your staff, because even if you are a solo practitioner and you already have staff in your practice, if you’re overwhelmed, more than likely they are also overwhelmed. So you’ve got to really take stock in what’s happening with your staff. Even if there’s only one other person in your practice, it’s highly possible that that person’s feeling a tremendous amount of stress and you don’t want to lose that person. So now’s the time. Definitely now is the time. [LATOYA] That’s a great point. I was just doing this in the webinar too, listing out, okay, what are all the tasks you do, I don’t care, from the smallest to the biggest? What can you delegate? What are your strengths? What I hear you saying is, listen, what is it that you don’t have to be doing and your day could be more profitable, successful, peaceful, if you move it along? You’re saying that’s the things a VA from REVA, your company could do, like, give it to us, we can take care of that stuff. [BETH] Absolutely. Another really big piece of what we do that makes us different from some of the other, there’s a lot of VA companies out there, there’s popups that happen almost every day, new companies that pop up and they go away just as fast. But what is different about us is that we are a true extension of the practice. You’re not outsourcing, you’re bringing in a medical professional that works with your practice and your practice alone. They’re not, it’s not a big giant call center where they’re handling multiple practices. If we place Anna in your practice, she’s only working with you. She’s getting to know everything about your practice. She’s managing and handling your patients or any of those tasks that are delegated to her. Ultimately she’s not handling Dr. Smith down the street. She’s with you. That’s the part that makes us very different from some of the other VA companies out there, is that we’re an extension of your practice. You’re not outsourcing it. We’re an extension of your practice. [LATOYA] I love that. I’ve used VAs before and they may have like two or three different practices. Sometimes it can be frustrating where I don’t know how they clock their time and all of a sudden the time is up and used up for the day and you don’t know what happened But I love the fact that this person is almost, it’s like having another team member. [BETH] Exactly. [LATOYA] So you train the VA on what to say, but we also, if they were to come on board, okay, I need to train you on our culture and our language and how we move to? [BETH] Exactly, and your tools. Yep, exactly. So we’ve already recruited them, we’ve vetted them, we have trained them, training program. We’ve assessed what their skillset is, we know what they’re good at, and we know what tasks they ultimately would find challenging, but also they would be really good at, and you would find the value in that. So ultimately we do all of that piece ahead of time. Then, so if you were to come to me and say, “Beth, gosh we really need, our front desk is overwhelmed, we’re not be able to pick up the phones. My front desk is having to stay an extra hour at the end of the day to try to follow up with patients that we haven’t been able to follow up with because our our voicemail is full. We need a virtual receptionist.” Ultimately we’re going to select someone from our pool of VAs that did extraordinarily well in our training on front desk tasks, on handling patient care, on doing full new patient intakes and can have really good conversations with patients. That’s the person that we’ll select that then ultimately would be part of your team. So it’s not like, oh, here, here we found someone here. Just take this person. No, we’ve really done our due diligence in terms of the front end to make sure, number one, is this person showing up every day on time? Are they fully committed? Do they have the skill and do they have the will to be successful with you and us here at REVA? Then beyond that, then we’re making sure that, well, we want to place somebody who really is going to love the job. We don’t want turnover. You don’t want turnover. So we place them in the skillset that they really enjoy, that we know that they will excel at. That’s on us. We handle all of that. That’s another great thing about adding a medical virtual assistant from REVA is we’ve already done all that. So you know you’re getting somebody qualified, you know you’re going to get somebody good, you know that they’re going to, as soon as we put them, put that button in that seat you’ve got somebody that’s ready to get off and running. That’s the front end that we already handle. When they are assigned to the practice and they start working closely with the practice, that’s the part that we’re talking about, about your, it’s an extension of your practice. We’re going to do things your way, we’re going to use your script, we’re going to handle patients the way you want to handle them. if you say, I do not want a patient on hold longer than 30 seconds, well then that’s not going to happen. We’re going to make sure that there’s a patient that’s not on hold longer than 30 seconds. So there’s, but all of that needs to be trained to us by how you want things to be done but we will help create the workflow and the process flow if you haven’t already done that for that particular role, we will help with that. But then it’ll be our job to manage the VA, our VAs to make sure that they’re doing and hitting the KPIs and doing the role the way you expect them to do it. [PILLARS OF PRACTICE] Ready to take your practice to the next level? In our Pillars of Practice e-courses, you’ll find free resources designed to help you take your practice to the next level. In there, you’ll find over 20 free downloadable resources and tools, eight-minute expert videos on a variety of topics to help you make your private practice stronger and three hours of video trained to make growing a practice quicker. Head on over to www.pillarsofpractice.com. [LATOYA SMITH] Now, would the practice owner be also able to interview, like to say Anna, you dropped that name a minute ago, could we interview Anna? So even though you’re telling us, Anna’s great, we believe you, Anna’s great, but is Anna a great fit here? Can we also interview her to say, I’m not sure Anna’s the best, best fit culturally. Can we move it around? Is that a possibility too? [BETH] Yep, great question. We don’t typically have our clients do interviews, pre-interviews, but we allow it to happen. So if we have a practice that’s like, “I’m a solo practitioner. I want to make sure that I also jive with this person. They’re going to be working directly with me and my and my assistant, so I want to make sure this,” so yes, absolutely. We would tell you, “Okay, we think that we’ve got the right selection for you. Let’s do like a meet and greet and you have the opportunity to meet this person.” If they’re like, yep, this is a good fit, we’re going to move forward, then we go ahead and move forward. [LATOYA] Okay, awesome. Do your VAs all, like what are the typical hours they work for, like private practices? Is it going to be 40 hours a week? Can it be like, what if somebody’s starting small, they need somebody 10 hours and then, like how does that work? [BETH] Yeah, great question. We are full-time and full-time only. All of our, in order to bring on really good staff and keep them, we need to offer full-time roles. So if we only offered part-timers, we would lose people. They just wouldn’t stay long-term. Ultimately, with medical practices, we want to bring in really good talent and we want them to stay, we want them to stay long-term and really love their job. So we are full-time only, it’s a 40-hour work week. It’s Monday through Friday typically. It’s Monday through Friday, a nine-hour shift with a one-hour lunch each day. Those working hours are up to you in terms of the medical practice. Typically they will shadow and do the exact same hours as the medical practice is open. We have some medical practices obviously, that they’ll have a shortened day on Friday, but a long day on Thursday because they’ll see patients up till 7:00 PM but then Friday is a shortened day. We’ll follow that schedule. So it really just depends on the practice schedule and also what hours you want the VAs to work. We also have medical practices that they shut their phones off at 4:00 o’clock and they don’t want to handle any of that anymore but patients are still calling after 4:00. So they have our VAs extend, basically they’re coming in an hour later than your front desk staff, they’re coming in an hour later because then they’re staying an hour after the phones are shut down at the practice and the VAs are continuing to take those calls. So it really depends on what works best and how you guys want it to work for your practice. We’re very flexible on that. [LATOYA] Of course, you’ll work with different time zones, right? You’re on the east coast and — [BETH] Correct. We are nationwide so we follow, if we have a client on the west coast, we’re following west coast time and the practice hours of that practice. [LATOYA] This is awesome. It sounds like your VAs do anything from not just answering the phones to, am I right in saying this, credentialing, billing, adjustment in schedule, basically anything that I need off my plate? You train for it outside of seeing clients, right? [BETH] Yes, correct. Yep, exactly. So they’re not seeing patients directly, but they may have direct patient access, they may be having conversations with patients or they may be tasked, the administrative tasks in the backend. Prior authorizations, insurance verifications, those typically have become really most of like the task heavy, you’re paying someone in your practice, or even you, if you’re a solo practitioner, you might be doing some of those things for your patients. Don’t get bogged down with doing a $10 to a $12 an hour task. If you are a practitioner or if you’ve got somebody in your medical practice, like a medical assistant or a mid-level practitioner of some kind, they should not be doing that. There’s way more, there’s much better ways for them to be spending their time that could potentially bring in more revenue for the practice or also even just be able to offer more of that white glove service to your patients if you have mid-levels and other people in your practice that are readily available. So if you have somebody who’s on the phone doing insurance verifications and prior authorizations and you’ve got patients that are waiting to hear back from them or waiting to be seen in the other room or it’s delaying the day, that should be pushed off to a medical virtual assistant from REVA. That is really a lot of the heavy lifting that we do because it takes, I mean now the hold times with insurance companies have gotten out of control, getting the right agent on the phone sometimes is really hard and getting the correct answers of what you’re looking for to get some of those things authorized. All of that is so incredibly time consuming and bogs down your internal staff or you as a practitioner. That should be handed off to a medical virtual assistant. We can do all of that. Then there’s revenue cycle, billing, billing insurance, claims, denials, and then collections from patients that have an overdue balance. That’s also a piece of something that that can be delegated and you can create a team to help work on that as well. [LATOYA] Okay, I love that. Yeah, all of it. What about, and I haven’t heard you mention this, which may not go with it, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, what about like even any social media stuff or writing blogs and stuff like that? [BETH] Great questions. In our medical side of our business, we typically hire people with a medical background. They have a nursing degree or they came from an insurance company. They know, they very clearly understand how our insurance works here in the United States and they can help on the insurance piece. That is such a special skillset. Somebody that has the ability to be like a marketer, somebody who has like the creative side to create cool graphics and post interesting things on social media. We most definitely have talent on our real estate side that that’s what they specialize in, so we would be able to set up any clients that would come to us on the medical side, we would be able to set them up with someone that’s a virtual assistant that doesn’t necessarily have medical background, but they do have background and experience in social media marketing and in social media, so vlogging, all of those sorts of things, or blogging, whatever it may be that’s needed. We would be able to set you up with somebody that has the ability to do it. The nice thing about that is then you can offer, and we can offer part-time VAs for that role. Our real estate side of our division and all of our social media side they have the ability and we have the ability to be able to hire part-time. That’s a really nice option. [LATOYA] Okay, got it. So when it comes to anything outside of the direct client care or billing or traditionally or stuff like that, you can offer a part-time role that will help as far as marketing and bringing in more clients? It’s not like you got covered, like I said, outside of seeing the clients, does it sound like you got it covered? [BETH] Right, outside of seeing the clients or with direct patient care, we do actually do some, we have involvement with some patient care as well if there’s lab results that come in or anything in a medical practice that comes in and patients need to be notified or anything, yes, we have direct involvement with that sort of thing. But aside from actually doing the actual being the physician or the therapist in the practice, no, we can’t do that. But we can do all of the ancillary, all the things that happen around, all that around that we can do. [LATOYA] Okay, I went too far about being the band because it sounded too good. I was like, listen, you can see clients. All right, yeah, no, but Beth, this is awesome. I mean, like I said, I get this question a lot. I think a lot of us consultants get this question a lot about the when, what can they, what can somebody do? How do I know if I’m finding the right person? It sounds like your team is very well trained and there isn’t anybody who wouldn’t be well trained and doesn’t know what they’re doing as much as it’s just a good fit, who you going to work with. Kinda like when you hire an interview for your office, you want to find people that fit. [BETH] Absolutely. And we’ve done all that vetting already for you. We already have an idea just by, based on our recruiting and sourcing team, so we have a recruiting team and our sourcing team that recruits to bring in the right candidates to work here at REVA. Then beyond that, once they have all their initial interviews, they’ve met with our HR team, then they go into our training and they go and they really get to know our trainers. Our trainers get to know them really, really well. We already know who takes initiative, who’s outgoing, who is just task, task, task. Just, I’m quiet, but I’m going to bang through the work. We know who those people are. So we line them up with the proper role and make sure that they’re set up correctly and with the right client for success. [LATOYA] I think this is awesome. Beth, tell us, tell the audience how they can get in touch with you, how they can ask all the questions themselves, like how can they reach out to you? [BETH] The great thing is you can go right to our website, which is www.revaglobalmd.com, and there is a spot where you can click on a button that says schedule a strategy session. You can click on that button, it will bring up a calendar, you can pick the time and date that works best for you, and there will be a call directly, either with myself or somebody within my team to discuss how a medical virtual assistant can really be of use and success in your practice. Then we just go from there. We can answer any and all questions that are necessary. If you’re ready to start now, awesome. If you’re not, but you’re just doing like, like some of the research to get your ducks in a row, we’re still a great place to start to get that strategy session together so you know what you need to be ready for when you are ready to go ahead and move forward. [LATOYA] That is awesome. That sounds good. I mean, this sounds amazing. I mean, I’m being really serious with you. [BETH] And the other really cool thing that I’m particularly excited about is that what we have found, and this is just a true testament to how incredibly well this works and the people that we’re bringing in and the right candidates and the right people that work here at REVA, almost most of our growth has been internal with already existing clients. So they come to us, they start with one VA and then very quickly they’re like what? This is working out great. We want another VA. Then before you know it, they’re now at Five VAs. Then we have other clients that end up with 20 VAs. So when it works well and things go well, that means we’re doing our job and we’re doing it extraordinarily well. That’s something to be proud of. You may not, you’re not going to find that everywhere else. That’s something that I’m particularly excited about because that means we’re bringing in the right talent and then we’re managing them and we’re managing them well. And that’s a big piece of the puzzle, is the management piece. We manage the VAs, we make sure they’re showing up every day on time, we’re following their KPIs, we’re looking at their end of day reports every day to make sure that they’re productive and hitting the levels of productivity that we expect and you expect. If there needs to be upskilling, like maybe a VA isn’t quite cutting knit and only doing 10 insurance verifications today when they really should be doing 13, that’s where we spend the time to be coaching that VA to coach them up. Is it a will issue? Is it a skill issue? Once we figure out what the issue is, it’s our job to then fix it. It’s our job to then coach the VA to get them there. If we have a VA that can’t get there, we have that discussion with you, with the practitioner, the practice owner or the person of the practice that’s handling and working directly with us. Then we work through that and we’ll offer our placement VA or we’ll give the VA a little bit more time to get upskilled and really hit the mark. But that doesn’t happen that often but when it happens, we are on top of it. We’re making sure that on the management side, that’s a really big piece of what we do and what we offer that has been a huge part of our success. [LATOYA] I think this sounds amazing. For those listening, whether you’re a solo practice right now and you want to grow, start to grow into a group practice, but you have a thriving group practice and you realize, listen, I need more support, more help, more structure, I need somebody already trained to do it, I don’t have the time or the manpower to sit down and train somebody to do it, man, this REVA Global Medical, this sounds amazing, Beth, thank you so much. And make sure you reach out to Beth. Beth, tell it one more time how to find you just so they can — [BETH] Find me on our website, www.revaglobalmd.com, as in medical doctor.com. You can create, you can go ahead and click on strategy session and set it up and you’ll either talk to me or someone else on our team. [LATOYA] Awesome. Thank you Beth, so much for being a guest on the podcast. [BETH] Oh, I’m so excited you had me. Thanks so much. [LATOYA] If you love this podcast, please be sure to rate and review. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.