Everything You Need to Know About Hiring a VA, And How You Can Find Great Help For a Fraction of the Cost

In this episode of the My DPC Story Podcast, host Dr. Maryal Concepcion welcomes back Justin Lam, founder and CEO of Cool Blue VA, to discuss the benefits of hiring medical virtual assistants for Direct Primary Care (DPC) practices. They dive into key questions DPC physicians face: when is the right time to hire a VA, and how do you efficiently hire and onboard one? Justin shares actionable exercises, such as time and task audits and skills gap analysis, to help doctors identify tasks they can delegate and areas requiring support. The episode highlights the cost-effectiveness of virtual assistants compared to traditional hires, and details how VAs can boost practice efficiency, revenue, patient satisfaction, and physician work-life balance. 

Listeners also learn about Cool Blue VA’s free practice analysis and two-week 80 hours FREE trial, making it easy to experience the value of a medical virtual assistant risk-free. Perfect for DPC physicians exploring ways to streamline workflow, reduce burnout, and grow their practices. For your copy of Cool Blue VA's List of 90+ jobs a medical VA can do and more, stop by and say HI to Justin at the upcoming DPC Summit or visit them at coolblueva.com/2weeks to start a free trial!

LISTEN TO THE MY DPC STORY EPISODE WHERE JUSTIN AND HIS SISTER DR. CARRIE LAM SHARED THE STORY OF HOW COOL BLUE VA GOT STARTED HERE!

Transcript

Maryal Concepcion MD: 0:04

Direct Primary care is an innovative alternative path to insurance-driven healthcare. Typically, a patient pays their doctor a low monthly membership and in return builds a lasting relationship with their doctor and has their doctor available at their fingertip. Welcome to the My DPC Story podcast, where each week you will hear the ever so relatable stories shared by physicians who have chosen to practice medicine in their individual communities through the direct primary care model. I'm your host, Marielle Conception. Family, physician, DPC, owner, and former fee for service. Doctor, I hope you enjoy today's episode and come away feeling inspired about the future of patient care direct primary care. Well, welcome everybody. I am so excited to be joined by Justin Lamb again on the podcast, we are going to be talking about a super hot topic that we are going to be buzzing about at the upcoming DPC summit, where you'll get to meet Justin and you'll get to meet one of the VAs that we'll be talking about today. So cool. Blue VA is an amazing company. They have been so supportive of the DPC movement, and they have been working continuously to improve how they are pairing virtual assistants, medical virtual assistants with DPC physicians to help DPC practices thrive. So Justin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Justin Lam: 1:34

Thanks for having me, doctor. So happy to be here. We had a great conversation last time, so I was super excited to come back. Yeah, I just love the DPC community. I've been to a lot of DPC conventions now, and so I just wanted to continue to support this vibrant community and, this movement really.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 1:51

Absolutely. And if you have not listened to the episode where Justin and his sister, Dr. Carrie Lamb came onto the podcast, please make sure you check out the link in the blog accompanying this podcast because it's so important to not only recognize cold blue's work in helping the DBC movement, but also recognizing that from the story that they talked about before they. Stand by their word because they use medical VAs all the time in Dr. Lamb's practice. And their family is also using medical virtual assistants because they have quite the, the medical community amongst the lamb family. So this is coming from not only passion to help the community, but experience. that's why I wanna make sure that if you haven't listened to their previous conversation, take a listen to that. But today we're going to be talking about the two big questions when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant in the DPC space. And those two questions are, well, how do I know the time is right to hire a va? And then the second set of questions is going to be revolving around how to actually hire the va. Once you recognize that, pretty much everybody needs a va. So, yeah. So with that, let's get started on today's webinar, everything you need to know about hiring and how you can find great help for a fraction of the cost. So, Justin, take us away.

Justin Lam: 3:13

Yeah, absolutely, Dr. Mario. And the things I'm gonna be talking about do pertain to a virtual assistant, to a va, but really once, what do you learn from this? You can really take and apply to anything really for any hiring practice as well. uh, I've talked to a lot of HR people I've hired and fired, thousands upon thousands of people now, so these are all things that I've learned throughout the years to really fine tune and to give you guys really these gems here. And if you guys are just listening, there are slides, but you know, we'll, we'll talk you through it and whatnot, so it should be all right. once again, I'm Justin Lamb. I was the CO and CMO of Dr. Lamb Coaching. And then as Dr. Marielle mentioned, I was also the CEO of Lamb Clinic, along with my sister, Dr. Carrie and Dr. Jeremy Lamb. And that's when we started utilizing virtual assistance. Really blew, blew up the clinic. So then I came out and founded Cool Blue va, which I'm the CEO and founder of that. But really the core issue that what we're talking about Dr. Maria, right, is when and how do you know what to hire a va? And really the core of that is what is the most valuable asset in your practice? Or if you haven't opened a practice yet, what do you think is the most valuable asset in your practice here? And really the answer to that is that it's you, the doctor, right? Because there's only one doctor. In the practice, indirect primary care, unless you hire somebody else. But when you first open it up, really there's only you. And so your time, you're the only doctor in the practice. You only have eight hours in a day, right? Where you can see patients. And that's really, a rate limiting step, right? That's what is limiting. How fast you can grow really is your time to do that, and the second thing is your knowledge, right? You're the only person in your practice who went to school to be a doctor, and nobody else has that knowledge that they can pass on to their patients, right? So these two assets, they have to be protected at all costs. Because like I said, they're the rate limiting step for you and how fast your practice can grow and how fast you guys can scale. And it's unfortunate nowadays, we're finding that more and more doctors are spending a lot of time on paperwork. There's been a couple studies done that, over the years people are spending 11 to 22% more time on documentation on their EHR. On average, people are spending two hours, two hours of clerical work for each hour they're spending face-to-face with their patients. Right? So that's really unfortunate. That's a lot of your time that's spending, that you could be seeing patients generating revenue, taking care of people, using your doctoring skills, which are actually just spending on admin work, busy work, whatnot, not, seeing patients.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 6:03

These data points are so relatable to probably everybody out there who has gone through residency, who has gone through a corporate practice. Because when we think about, even with the advent of ai, with the advent of how many more, back office people, can we hire or can the corporation hire. It's still so ridiculous how much pajama time is spent on charting. Mm-hmm. And so I I go back to my comment and my joke about who needs a va, probably everybody. And I, I love though that you clarified it. These skills could be used for a person who's in person or a virtual assistant, but when it comes to your time that you are spending and not getting paid for, typically this is where in DPC it matters more because your time is definitely related more so to your overhead then in unemployed role. So I really love that you highlighted the, ugly reality of pajama time. Mm-hmm. Work that, again, most of us never got paid for, so the thing I love about this conversation where it's different than the last conversation with Dr. Carrie Lamb is that we're gonna get a little interactive here. So if you are driving, if you are mowing your lawn definitely, take a listen, but keep in mind that you can press pause and you can rewind and you can press pause when you're in a place where you can brainstorm and write things down. But Justin's going to help us go through the time and task audit first because if you are a person out there who is saying I don't think I need a VA though. I think I can manage my time, pretty well this time and task audit is pretty slick at actually breaking down in black and white what you are doing with your time. So Justin, tell us about this first exercise.

Justin Lam: 7:50

Just a little spoiler alert, if you guys really don't want to do any of these exercises. There'll be something at the end of the podcast here that will really give you the shortcut on how to do all this and how we can take care of all this for you here. But the first exercise, Dr. Marilyn, like you mentioned, is a time and task audit. Really what you wanna do is. Write down on a piece of paper the top five tasks that you do and what they are and how much time you spend on them a week here, and it could be anything like, doctor, you say, pajama time, like charting, if you're answering patient emails or phone calls, right? Or if you're busy ordering labs or if it's like social media and you're just on social media, like posting and creating content, it could be anything that you're taking your time on and you wouldn't really, really list it down. Number one, number two, number three, number four, number five. I'm sure there's a hundred things that you could list down, right? But just start with the top five that you really spend the most time on. And, take your time and do that. Once you have those five, and you can pause this at any time, and see, but once you have those listed down, then you really want to circle the tasks that you can delegate to a virtual assistant. And realistically, when you're thinking about that, is anything that you're doing on a computer that can be delegated out. The only thing that can be delegated out is if you're seeing a patient in person, those are the things that you cannot delegate out. But anything that's on a pc, on a laptop, on your phone, on your computer, you can pretty much delegate that out to a virtual assistant or to a person, right? So circle those tasks and keep those in mind.'cause we'll be coming back to them in a little bit here. And just to bring the point home again, here's some other data points that we had. Physicians are spending 20% of their time indirect clinical face-to-face time with patients only, and about almost 50% of the time, 49% to be exact, doing EHR and desk work. And even when they're in the patient room, 52% of the time is just interacting with the patient. And 37% of the time they're still on a computer, typing in and doing desk work in the room with the patient right there, right? So that's the unfortunate reality that we live in right now. And that's all stuff that's on a computer that you could, hand off to somebody to really help you out.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 10:15

And I will say here that if you're listening out there and you're like, but I haven't yet started my DPC or my DPC is literally a week old and I have zero to 10 patients, and you're like, I don't even know what my tasks are. What I would say is that you have an entire community of people who have practices similar to yours in terms of you might have a practice next door or an hour and a half away that has, somebody else who is a breadwinner in their family or is a parent or is a caregiver, and you. Can talk to these people because we are all position entrepreneurs and we have all been there. We have all been there on day one. So when it comes to, if you don't necessarily know what your top five tasks are, one, realize that you can ask other people to get ideas of what their tasks are. And two, your top five can always change. So this is a nimble conversation. You can come back to it in a month after you open your DPC in two years after you open your DPC and you're ready to hire another staff person so Justin here, let's keep going in terms of why a doctor comes to you to start asking Colier. Can you please help me with answering the question? Do I need to hire a virtual assistant?

Justin Lam: 11:32

Yeah, absolutely. And just to add onto a little bit what you said, if you don't have top five things that are taking the most amount of time, you could just write down the top five things that you hate doing, and those are things that you can hand off as well, right? The things you just dread doing on a daily basis. Yeah,

Maryal Concepcion MD: 11:49

great advice.

Justin Lam: 11:51

Yeah. But moving on to why you need to hire really the first thing is to extend your capability, right? So you can only see so many patients or return so many calls in a day. Like I said, your time is a valuable asset. So in order to extend that capability, you need support staff to help you, right, help you call patients, help you return emails, help you book appointments, all that stuff is time that you could be seeing a patient generating income, taking care of people. So really extending your capabilities is huge. Protecting your time. Like I said, anything that a doctor is to do should be really only things that a doctor can do. So you can really focus on your strengths, right? That's huge. Third thing, really enhance the patient experience. DPC, medical practice, we don't really think about it, but it is a service industry. Really, we're all about customer service. We're all about patient satisfaction. And so you wanna make sure that the patients that you're seeing have a great experience.'cause then they're gonna keep coming back to you. Right? So timely follow ups, fast response times to emails, to texts, smooth processes. This all improves the patient satisfaction. That all makes the patient want to come back, and see.'cause that's super important in the service industry, in the medical industry, and then increased revenue potential, right? You wanna spend more time on revenue generating activities. You wanna spend less time on paperwork here. So anything that's gonna generate revenue you should be doing or you should be hiring somebody to do. And anything that's just more administrative, busy work, grunt work, I don't like to say that, but somebody has to do it. Right. A doctor, let's say makes like$150 an hour. Like you don't need to pay yourself$150 an hour to do something that costs$10 an hour to do. Right. And it's just not efficient. So you should be doing stuff that generates the revenue. Mm-hmm. And to reduce burnout, I'm sure a lot of DPC doctors have already experienced this. That's why they left, working at hospitals, working at corporations and whatnot.'cause they want to have that work life balance. They want to use their medical degree to help the community out, help patients out and really do what they want to medical school for. And then you guys didn't go to medical school to. Do paperwork, right? To learn how to market right? That's not really what you went to medical school for. So find people hire people that are gonna be great at doing that for you so you can once again focus on doing what you love, what you're passionate about, and then that's gonna reduce burnout. Now you know why you wanna hire people. So when is the right time to hire? As Dr. Marielle mentioned, there's runs a gamut of DPC doctors, people who have been established for a long time, people who are just starting out, people who are just thinking about starting out. So when is the right time to hire? And the first thing is there's a lot of skills that you need as, as business owner, You need to have sales skills. You need to have customer service, legal, accounting, medical mark, admin, marketing, it, web, website design, right? Operations, human resources, this's, just naming a few skills here. So you, chances are you're probably already hiring somebody to do some of this stuff and some of the stuff that you're taking on, which you may just be kind of figuring out how to do on the fly or something, hire somebody who has the skills really to make life easy for yourself,

Maryal Concepcion MD: 15:23

But I think this is so important to recognize like. When you're a physician entrepreneur and you may be joining a clinic that's already open, but still these are the things that are involved in a service business, like you said. And so it's really important to recognize that not only are these skills going to be in a service business to what extent that's gonna be to determined by the type of practice you are in. But when it comes to figuring out where your skills are strong and where your skills can be helped by other people who have stronger skills in these areas that you talked about. Justin's going to be walking us through our second exercise. So get ready. We're gonna have our second exercise focusing on where are your skills and where is the gap between the skills that you have and the person who can help out with their training and their expertise.

Justin Lam: 16:12

And that's where the skills gap exercise comes in, so what you really want to do for this next exercise. Is list the skills that you currently have as a business owner, for example, you're great at being a doctor, If you worked in hospital, you learned how to take care of patients, you have great customer service and whatnot. Or you have a friend or your spouse or significant other who has a background in legal or something, or accounting. Those are skills that you kind of have here. So list the skills that you have. Those are skills that you don't need to hire for, right? So you are pretty confident and comfortable in those skills. on the opposite side of that is skills that you don't have. Like I said, everybody went to school to be a doctor. Not everybody went to school to be a business owner, an entrepreneur, right? So there's skills that people lack. So list down all the skills that you feel like you need help with that could be improved on, that you're not quite sure on what to do with in those areas here. And those are really gonna be the skills that you need to hire for, right? That's what you need the virtual assistant for to fill in those gaps for you. so now you know what skills. That you need for to hire somebody. The other thing is when you don't have time I always keep coming back to time. I always keep harping on that. Right. Dr. Mariel.'cause I mean, that's the one finite resource that you know, is, is the same for everybody. There's only 24 hours in a day. It doesn't matter if you're Elon Musk, it doesn't matter if you're Dr. Marriott, doesn't matter if you're me. There's only 24 hours in a day. You can only do so much. So you only have this fixed amount of time to do everything that you need to do. And starting a business, is not easy. That's there's so much that you have to do and there's only so many hours in a day. And that's especially true if you're also like juggling your current job mm-hmm. While trying to start your DPC that basically cuts your time in half or into a quarter or whatever it is to really get your, your practice up and running. And so even if you're just starting out, it's very beneficial to hire somebody to get you that help. And the last thing is you don't have the energy to hire or you don't have the energy to do any of the work. You have the time, but you're burnt out. Really. Your health is the most important thing as well, So if you don't have the energy to, to hire, that's very important. You need to get people to help you out. Everybody thinks they can handle more. I find that to be true for myself as well. We wanna take on because doctors. A very responsible individual. As you guys went through medical school, you guys studied, burned the mid idle. You guys worked 80 hours a week, you guys worked a hundred hours a week. So, you guys are capable of so much. But sometimes, that leads to the burnout. That leads to just overwhelming yourself and taking too much on, and then things start to fall through the gaps, whether it's patient care or whether it's something else even. And eventually something starts to fall through the cracks. I always say hire early instead of hiring late. When your plate is at 50%, you should hire somebody already.'cause that place stacks up very quickly, right? And so you always wanna make sure you're handing off stuff as quickly as possible. Getting help as quickly as possible to really, help yourself out, help your practice out, help your patients out.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 19:34

Yeah, great, great point. And this is, this is going back to hashtag first world problems when your DPC is growing and you're like, oh my goodness, I now have multiple patients to onboard and I have multiple patients to get records for or to, to call CVS for vaccines, for whatever. I absolutely agree that things just stack up and then you don't even realize that the, you're gonna get a fire hose pretty soon in a lot of cases. Justin. I will say that the skills that you listed, it might be intimidating for some of the listeners out there because things like sales and legal and website design, these are things that, when we go to medical school, nowhere in our essays do they ask us like, where are you and your level of being able to do all of these skills that you just mentioned? now that we've talked about how, time is, is not infinite. We all wish it could be infinite sometimes, but definitely when you're looking for how to. Maintain a service business that is going to have, quick response time, quality response time, quality, customer service and all of the physicians and entrepreneur hats that we wear. It is so important to keep in mind that if you are struggling for your own time management. If your DPC is encroaching on your time that you're spending with family things that you didn't like I, I really like how you said, you know, when you're 50% full, think about hiring before the, the plate stack too high. If you are saying, Hey, I, I can do things like QuickBooks, but it does not bring me joy. If the energy that you're experiencing after doing all of these tasks in your DPC is draining, then the next question comes and like we talked about in the very beginning the next question is really how do you go about hiring someone to help? So, tell us about how one goes about hiring a virtual assistant, especially by partnering with Cole Blue va.

Justin Lam: 21:32

Absolutely. So yeah, we'll go through some best practices for hiring staff. Number one, you wanna write a clear job description of what you expect for your virtual assistant to do or for your staff to do. So we're gonna have clear, defined responsibilities, expectations, what tools they're gonna use, and what the outcomes you expect are, and that leads us into our third exercise. And once again, spoiler, if you don't want to do any of these exercises, I'll just tell you right now, you can give us a call and we'll do it for you for free. So, if you don't want to do the exercise, that's absolutely fine, but I find it's just beneficial to kind of work through it, so you understand what you're getting into, what you need and what your, what your business really needs. Right? And Dr. Mario mentioned earlier, these are good things to do. On an ongoing basis really to kind of get a pulse, get a check on the health of your practice and how you are doing and how you feel like your practice is doing. So these are great things to do on an ongoing basis. Right now, we've already identified in first exercise things that take up the most time, and what the tasks as a result you should be delegating'cause they take up so much time. And then in our second exercise, we already identified what skills that you lack or you need support with, right? So, all of that. Then you can turn into basically your job description and what you want to hire for. So what's the job title that you have, what you need help with, right? What kind of support do you need? That's the first thing you wanna write down. And the second thing is the summary of the role based on the top three tasks, top five tasks you circle for delegation. What's the main goal? For this person, right? And also another tool, like you could put all this into chat, GBT as well, and they'll spit out a great job description for you as well. And those, get you something really solid as well. So, AI is amazing to help you out too, right? Key responsibilities is the next thing that you want to do. So, once again, from your delegation list that you, you that you wrote on Exercise One, write down what the expectations are and what you're gonna be doing. Next thing you wanna have is required tools and software, right? What you're gonna be using, whether you're using Jane or Hint or you're on. What, phone service you're using. Make sure that they know what you're using, so that they can be trained in those tasks or if they're familiar with it, even better, right? So what are the skills that they need and whether they're the qualifications that they need, that's the next thing that you want to do. What kind of traits or experience would make someone thrive in this role? So, for example, they're very detail oriented, or they need to know medical terminology if they're gonna be a scribe, right? Or they can be fluent in English, or if you need them to speak Spanish, you mean? Or Spanish speaking community. Those are things that you wanna write down. And what are the hours that they're gonna be working Monday to Friday, eight to 12, one to five. What's gonna be on going on as far as that goes? How should they report to you and what the expectations are for their job as well. The more you delineate and have clear expectations, the more. It gonna be easier to work together with the person that you do hire, right? So, and once again, if you don't wanna do any of that, like I said, just give us a call at K Blue Va and we'll be happy to help you out with all of those exercises. We do a three practice analysis that basically it's about 30 minutes we really dive into your practice, or if you're thinking about hi, starting up a practice, we dive into what is involved with all of that. We'll go through all those exercises with you and we'll really, fine tune and pinpoint what your needs are, what you need help with, and then we can get you to write person for that position of that job. But the next thing that you wanna do when you're hiring is to test the candidate. You wanna make sure that they're qualified for the job. A lot of people, I hate to say it, they're gonna lie on their resume, so you wanna make sure you do testing, and actually I recommend this first test called High Five Test. Great test. Actually everybody should do this test. Doctors should do this test as well. Here, and I'll go into that in a little bit here. But a typing test, super important, being on an EHR, now you gotta make sure that they type well, that's easily available. You can just Google typing test. Super easy to find spelling and grammar. Actually super important as well, especially with EHR. You wanna make sure your notes are written correctly, and having a math test actually really important as well, if they're handling anything with money, right? You wanna make sure they know how to count. And those are very simple tests that you can do. Here, the, the first test, the high five test really. It's online test that you can do, you can just go to high five test.com. They answer you a bunch of questions and it really identifies the strengths of what you have here. So for, I pulled up mine, just for example, this is a test I did. And you can see I'm a chameleon. I'm a winner, I'm an analyst, brainstormer, and a thinker. So those are my strengths. Those are things that I am good at, right? And you can see that things and it breaks down into four different areas. So thinking is one skill. Doing is one skill, feeling connecting people, empathizing with them is a skill, and then motivating is a skill. So you can see my strength is a lot in thinking. So I'm a great thinker. My weakness is I don't do stuff well, I don't execute well. So I get virtual assistants to help me execute things that I can't do, right? So what you want to find for your position then is things that they're gonna be good to do if they're gonna be like customer service oriented. You wanna get people who are like high on feeling right? So they can really connect with the with the patients. If you want people to do administrative work, you want to get people who are high on doing stuff, right? So that they get joy out of executing. They get joy out of completing, they get joy out of checklists right? And whatnot. And so having a StrengthFinder test is hugely beneficial and see to do, another thing, like I said, testing, spelling, and grammar. If you're watching the video, there's a sentence on the online here that has a bunch of spelling and grammar mistakes. And once again, I just pulled this off. I actually PT you sort just write, Hey, gimme a sentence that has spelling and grammar errors, and tell me what they are, and you can see and give them, write it down on a piece of paper or just print it down a piece of paper and give it to your staff and see if they can identify how many mistakes they can, this was actually like, I, I'm embarrassed to say I didn't identify every mistake on this thing. But yeah, my grammar's not that great. But you know, that's why you gotta hire people that have really good grammar, better grammar than myself. Right.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 28:23

I was gonna say that looks like when I'm sending internal portal messages, I'm like, that's pretty frequent. I'm like wow. That I totally, that could have been me writing that. Oh my goodness.

Justin Lam: 28:34

Yeah. And then, like I said, math test. Super simple. Just put three numbers, just put it out. I mean, you can have your calculator out, but they shouldn't have their calculator out. And they can do basic math three numbers out. See if they can add it together so you know that they can count money, right? Which is really important to make sure that you're getting paid right. So, once again, write a clear job description. Make sure you test a candidate, and then make sure you interview thoroughly, for a great place to start. Do a virtual interview if they do well in a virtual interview. Then you can bring them in for a physical interview during an interview. You don't wanna be asking like yes or no questions. Those are easy questions. Mm-hmm. You wanna ask open-ended questions like, what would you do in this scenario? How do you feel about this? Did you have an instance where, you got into a disagreement with a patient or anything like that? And they can kind of talk through it and you really see how they have. So, asking yes or no questions is, is, I mean, it is good questions, but they're, they're kind of just yes, no, it doesn't really bring a lot of flavor out of the personality of the person, right? So asking open ended questions vary, important, and then very important as well. And you wanna check with your state on whether you can do this or not, but you wanna have a, a trial period possible, so you can observe them in real life scenarios. Some, states require you to pay them for a trial period, some. Say you can have free for a trial period. And so you really wanna make sure that you are working with this person and it's gonna be a good fit for you guys. Right? That's always huge. So those are some best practices for hiring staff.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 30:13

That's awesome that you guys offer a practice analysis because I think that, again, especially for those people who are newer to DPC, they're planning, they're starting out. I think that a practice analysis can really help because again, when it comes to skills, you guys are very skilled in pairing a virtual assistant with the doctor. And When it comes to trial period, you guys have probably one of the sweetest deals out there in terms of you and Dr. Kerry Lamb spoke about it on your previous episode, and you still have a way for people to actually do a free trial through Cool Blue va. And so tell us about where people can go to hire a virtual assistant. Partnering with you guys at Cole Blue Vier.

Justin Lam: 30:57

If everything I went through sounds great, but it's super overwhelming. Don't worry. We run through all of this with our virtual assistants to make sure that you're getting the best candidate possible. We do a trial period with our virtual assistants, and on top of that we will make sure that you'll get a trial period with a virtual assistant as well. So we do two weeks free where you can work with your virtual assistant. I'll work with you for 40 hours a week 80 hours in total in two weeks to make sure that you know it's gonna be a good fit for you and that you guys really vibe and gel well together. And that's absolutely free. You can go to, at the end I'll throw up a, a QR code that you can go to, but you can go to cool blue va.com/two. That's the number two weeks. And that will get you to our landing page, and then you can sign up for a free trial right there.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 31:53

So as we keep talking, I definitely will say here that I have I have lived this journey of virtual assistance since before I opened my clinic, and I do think that this is so important what you're gonna talk to us about because when you're in your opening days especially, and your budget is tight, to be able to have help. When you're not able to do everything from day one. That was my journey. I think it's so important to realistically look at, how you can actually afford help on day one. So Justin, tell us about especially the difference between when you hire somebody virtually versus hiring somebody in person.

Justin Lam: 32:34

it's important to have both areas covered here, I want to present both sides of everything so you guys get a really good feel of what your needs are here. If you're hiring a local medical assistance according to us borough labor statistics now. The average hourly wage for our local medical assistant is about$20 and 84 cents an hour. And typically they're gonna have a high school diploma. They may or may not have medical assistant certificate. And the work experience is gonna be really variable, depending on what is available in your area, right? Usually people may have one year of experience or they may be fresh out of a high school or they just got their medical assistant certificate and they're just kind of looking and need experience a lot of times, right? And so with that, there comes a lot of HR headaches and compliance burdens. You have to make sure everything is like OSHA and hipaa, right? And you never know who you're gonna be getting. They may have unreliable work ethic. They have limited qualifications or experience and it takes a lot of time to onboard staff, and it can be expensive as well, especially if you're going with an agency. Agencies can sometimes take up to 50% of the wages. So instead of paying,$20 an hour, you're gonna actually end up paying like$30 an hour.'cause the agency's gonna take a cut of that. So it can be end up being really expensive. And in a recent study from the American Board of Family Medicine, it was actually found out that medical assistance locally had a really high turn rate of almost 60%. It's 59% in one year that they're gonna leave your practice. So, that's basically money down the drain, right? That you spent training them, working with them, building them up in terms of hours that can lead up to about,$14,000 that you spent training this ma only for them to leave. So, and it's very, very disheartening for one thing, but it's also very expensive. Now, that's not to say you shouldn't hire somebody physically, locally,'cause a local medical assistant can help you. They should focus on tasks and projects that are just necessary for the patient encounter, physically and tasks that are gonna bring you revenue. And so that's like rooming patients, vital patients, accepting payments locally injections, vaccines, things that generate revenue procedures, assisting the doctors on procedures, right? These are things that can generate revenue. Then they provide value, and then you can afford to pay them the more expensive rates. But everything else should be handed off to a medical virtual assistant because, I mean, spoiler alert, it's only 9 95 an hour to hire a medical virtual assistant. And for a list of everything that our medical virtual assistant can help you do, we'll be at DPC Summit coming up here. So make sure you stop by our booth. We have a list of over 90 things that our virtual assistant can help you out with. Make sure you grab that and see, or you can check out our website as well. And to find out a list of over 90 things that a virtual assistant can help you out with here.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 36:00

Now Justin, can you tell us what the difference is between a virtual assistant and a medical virtual assistant?

Justin Lam: 36:06

virtual assistants also the real people, they have a medical degree as well. They can have a medical degree, so they can be nurses, pharmacists, lab techs, really qualified people. And so instead of having a high school degree, they'll have a, a bachelor's degree at le at the very least, very qualified, very well educated. And they'll also have excellent work experience as well. We, when we're interviewing, like I said, we make sure that they have at least, three to five years of work experience, real life experience. So we make sure that they are very qualified to work with you and they're gonna be trained in exactly what your practice needs, whether that's customer service, administrative work, scribing anything that you need. We have our training programs to make sure that they get trained on that as well. And we get our virtual assistance from the Philippines because the Philippines has what is called the Data Privacy Act of 2012, which basically mimics HIPAA and high tech acts in America. So they're very data privacy forward. They're very secure about that as well. So, very important to hire virtual assistants from the Philippines. And, just to sum everything up, again, a virtual assistant can do everything short of touch. A patient, customer service, administrative tasks, medical assisting, marketing and practice growth. Dr. Mario, you're saying if people who are just thinking about starting off, but their practice or just open to practice, having that marketing experience, practice growth, executive assistant functions, to really lighten your load, that's super important to keep you growing. Keep the balls rolling, keep the, keep everything in motion, right? And see. And so, if you're not sure where to start or what you need help with come visit our booth again or come see us. That's why we do the practice analysis. It's really to help you figure out what you need, where to start, how to really get you the help that's gonna maximize your time and benefit, and if you don't have the time to train and whatnot, that's why we go through all those best practices for hiring. We do the training, we do the interviewing, we do the testing to make sure that you're gonna get a qualified candidate here. And if you're not sure if the virtual assistant, medical virtual assistant is the right fit, that's why we give you a two week guarantee, a two week free trial to make sure that you test it out, see if it's gonna be a good fit for you. See if you guys gel well together. See if you guys vibe together. See if it makes sense for your business, for your DPC. So take advantage of our two week guarantee. Sign up with us, stop by our booth experience. How a VA can really transform your practice, make your life easier, get you home to your kids on time, have you not miss any soccer practices or games or recitals or anything like that. That's really what we want for DPC doctors, right?

Maryal Concepcion MD: 39:13

Absolutely.

Justin Lam: 39:14

give us a call, 7 1 4 6 9 5 8,000. Email us admin@coolblueva.com or once again, the website for the two week free trial is cool blue va.com/two. That's the number two weeks. and we'll be at the DPC summit supporting the movement, so definitely stop by and say hello. Would love to talk more.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 39:39

I wish I had a list like that before I started. So definitely make sure that you stop by cold blue VA's table and meet Justin in person and grab one of those lists. And then if you're not able to be there in person, make sure that you go to their website so that you can download the list digitally. So that's fantastic. that cool Blue Vivier exist. I'm so glad that you turned your expertise into something that can help so many other people thrive in their DPC practices and 80 hours guys. I mean, that is a ton of work that can be done in a medical practice, especially a DPC practice. And so I highly encourage everyone to check out what can a medical virtual assistant do for your practice? Again, that website is cool blue va.com/the number two weeks. Thank you so much, Justin, for joining us today, and I am so excited for everything that you guys are bringing to the fold in DPC through your medical virtual assistants.

Justin Lam: 40:37

Thank you. Yeah. See you guys in person. Stop by the booth. Looking forward to continuing to support this movement. Thank you.

Maryal Concepcion MD: 40:46

Thank you for listening to another episode of my DBC story. If you enjoyed it, please leave a five star review on your favorite podcast platform. It helps others find the show, have a question about direct primary care. Leave me a voicemail. You might hear it answered in a future episode. Follow us on socials at the handle at my D DPC story and join DPC didactics our monthly deep dive into your questions and challenges. Links are@mydpcstory.com for exclusive content you won't hear anywhere else. Join our Patreon. Find the link in the show notes or search for my DPC story on patreon.com for DPC news on the daily. Check out DPC news.com. Until next week, this is Marielle conception.